The Amazing Bay of Banderas, Any Fish You Wish

Written weekly by Stan Gabruk of Master Baiter’s Sportfishing & Tackle

Before I get started, we were informed this week that we won’t be opening until June 1st now, I don’t see the need but no sense in going into what we can’t control. After my daily “fit” I was telling a friend about the things I learned from a group from the Scripts Institute, students from the world famous College of Oceanography in San Diego county. Living in Southern California, to me this college was the way people actually got their foot in the door, in the oceanography world that is. So when I noticed a scientific type / military-ish boat was just “marching” a ‘step’ at a time around the bay it was out of the ordinary. You never really know what many of these ships are doing in the bay. This particular day the crew from this ship came to my shop to get some of our world famous T-shirts. 

As is normal, I ask people where they’re from and other basic small talk and many times what I  hear is very interesting. This day was memorable. This group that came in to get some shirts, there were like four of them and I came around to ask what brought them to PV? They proceeded to ask me if I’d seen the military-ish looking shop working it’s way around the bay and indeed I was familiar with this ship. Of course I’d been asking about it with no answers except the normal dumb looks and shruged shoulders. 

They continued with that they had a project to map the bay which had never been mapped. It actually makes you think how we get these ocean charts in the first place. So it made sense to me and the conversation started. It turns out that they had a theory that the Bay of Banderas was / is very similar situation as Diamond Head, a beautiful and world famous bay in Hawaii. As with Diamond Head, the Bay of Banderas was once a very large volcano! This explains the shape of the bay being so round. And like Diamond Head the area closest to the ocean through the eons, wore away what land mass there was and the bay was formed. They continued with some more interesting information when they stated that near Los Arcos in the bay, there was a deep hole there that they dropped a bathysphere into. This is for all practical purposes a big lead sinker weighing 10,000 pounds of solid lead. It was dropped into this hole and at ten thousand feet down, it stopped, the water was denser than the lead, believe it or not. This means in this one spot the bay is more  or less bottomless and most likely the main spout of the volcano as we would know it. We don’t have much lava type signs like Hawaii, but this is what they told me. They continued to say how there were a few places out from the shore more than fifteen miles where the water is only 30 feet deep. I also found this very interesting and helps explain why there is so much bait in the bay. One thing for sure, the bay is a paradise for all species of fish that live in it. With sandy bottoms to structure and rocks close to the shoreline, there are many specific locations for many species and of course these hot spots will change with the season as species move in and out yearly. So there you go, we’re living in a land of wonder here in PV and now it’s just a little more “wondrous”.      

Until next week, don’t forget to kiss your fish…  

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