Arod Lakes ?

 That's the best part of the story but it all starts with our usual ' go find the coldest most uncomfortable place in our part of Montana ' and go there for sun up to see the scenes. They don't call it Freeze Out Lake for nothing. And this year we hit it on the best date yet with 50,000 birds which is not really a lot but because of the unusual dry spell and low water Lakes all the birds were in one place,,,,our place. 

The beautiful alpenglow at sunrise . The birds are all on the distant lake but are so loud they seem closer. Some lift off and others don't. When they do fly some go northeast some southwest, there's a certain mystery to it all. As I fiddled to get one more jacket on a group of a thousand or so surprised us by flying directly over us. You could feel and hear their wings.

So, the coffee  gets cold, the birds are off to the fields to eat . MP and I are out for our first ever edition of back roads of Montana. The night before as were eating steak and burgers at John Henry's in Choteau Montana we chatted locals up who were full of advice being obvious to them we were visitors. This wonderfully humorous woman who had 20 years in Choteau told us all the low water was a real problem for the birders and the she told us of Arod Lakes Migratory bird preserve which was 'only' 30 miles away and being smaller but deeper was chock full of birds.....But...what she didn't tell us was this.

Arod Lakes is smack dab in the middle of page 49 of our All Roads of Montana atlas.These farm roads must all be on section lines as they're everywhere, wash board and NO people. In 30 miles of it we came across 0ne truck. You kinda zig zag your way to where you're going. We started out on road # 21 and ended up on road # 29....One good thing is that with this dry land extensive farming there is little terrain to be in the way and we had cell service the entire way which was good because without Google maps at work for us I'd have been a bit nervous....we'd pull up to one of the many intersections , it was only funny once when I asked MP if the road was clear her way. 

So we arrive.  There's nobody there. Nobody around . No farms in sight . We felt like we were the only ones that had ever been there except maybe for the guy who shot up the place. We found a vault toilet on the far side of the lake with a one lane muddy road to it that was on top of a worn our earthen damn that looked to be falling apart...MP reminded me that the car is a S.U.V. after all.....the lake area and a view on down the road.

I wasn't looking forward to returning the way we had come, my kidneys couldn't handle it. So we went into executive session and decided to ask Google to take us to Conrad instead of Choteau and Walla it came back with directions and only 15 miles of gravel....and along the way we saw the most interesting things...A pheasant ran across in front of us with his head down like pheasants do and low and behold the next farm we came to said 'Running Pheasant Ranch. And one of his neighbors was spreading the word.

We saw antelope before we even left home. The thousands of Geese and Swans . Then we heard and saw Sandhill cranes jillions of ducks. We quit counting the deer but we easily saw 2 to 300.

So, our first post Mexico adventure is in the books and Montana adventures await. They're kinda funny in this State. they don't like new people and they talk of ' Montana values ' I'm still chewing on that one and I'll let you know when I decide what that means . But if anybody ever grinds me about being new here I'm gonna tell em two things...my parents are buried at Fort Harrison Veterans Cemetery and I've been to Arod Lakes..." have you" ? 

New song to arrive soooooooon.

I Got Mexico

 

Well. Mexico has certainly been in the news lately and anymore news comes in all varieties. News used to mean exactly that,  it's 'new'....current, now, had not happened before. So good luck finding that if it's what you want or if you need interpretations and opinions and graphic pics that could or could not be real just Google Mexico news and off ya go. But if you want to go to the why's you've come to the right place from a guy with a musicians communication, a young mans heart and an old mans sense and of course an uncharted course.

Because of the importance of this blog post I 'm starting with a song instead of ending with a song like I normally do. Of this song Eddy Raven wrote when I was just a kid is really a song about two people and a place for me its a story of love really, for me it's a threesome, me , MP and Mexico....

While our friends and family N.O.B. ( north of the border ) have had record cold and snow, wind storms and floods we've had rain one day in 4 months. But boy did it ever rain. Well it stopped like we knew it would and Walla... a new sunset . I used to name them so this one could be the ' the sky window ' . Good from bad, a day stuck inside to an evening on a crowded terrace with friends and a ' sky window '.

As I'm power walking my way towards a smaller body one morning a guy who I've never met stops me and pointing to the sky says ' what do ya make of that '. I was speechless for a bit . I kinda had a sense  I was getting farmed for chem trail discussion or maybe even the old cloud seeding deal . But what I noticed wasn't the trails as much as the change of directions when I said ' maybe they changed their minds or forgot something '.  Bet I was closer to the truth than he was .

Our area has grown so much and generally people hate that. I don't know if it's the change of if maybe the 'old days ' really weren't all that good, I expect the later is true . We used to have to go into town for everything just like we used to go into to Kenai from Soldotna for 'everything '. But now we've got little tiendas to get your tamales and Barria.  We've got Pharmacies, lots of them.  We have the friendliest Oxxo store in Mexico where you can pay your utility bills, buy eggs and of course mucho frio Pacifico's. We love Oxxo. And with progress gave us our 3 mile long bike path that leads directly to the Coco's Fruteria with the the freshest of everything. The fresh coconut water is so good I can't describe it and the Star fruit is....well...I love the look.

Right about the time I wake up from my 'yoga nap ' on the terrace I watch these guys commute from work. They laugh a lot . They are pneumaticos as they use the inner tube to float the oysters . They paddle out return in a couple hours or so with at least 100 pounds of oysters a person.  I'm pretty sure everybody's gotta work in this big world, some of us found the cool others make and create the cool . This job , this job has gotta be way more difficult and stressful than it looks and ya know I've learned that looks are deceptive....people that are good at things make it look easy. Did I mention they laugh a lot ?  

We found the Marino Museum which celebrates Mazatlan's 350 year old history. Marino is a brand of coffee here and I ain't mentioning no names but somebody I'm in love with thought it would be the Coffee museum....which of course would have been cool as well...The building is the old naval fort where the French lost the battle for Mazatlan years ago. 

Us and Bill and Sharon Radke in front of the flying dolphins.

I saw some graffiti one time that said ' graffiti saved my life '. This is on a beautiful but derelict ocean front building that like the newly refurbished museum must have some real history but for now being a billboard is OK with me. Now some might think it's tacky, maybe even property damage . But, to me it says welcome to Mazatlan, no questions asked....and we love ya right back Mazatlan.

Dear Team X

 

maybe you've  noticed your Morale officer  and talent scout has been M.I.A. for a while now. I apologize it seems this condition, my newest phobia has turned kinda chronic and I don't like it. It seems like dizziness is the only thing that really stuck from my high school years. It also seems to be vision related. Having more hours in a boat than 99 % of the world and never getting seasick leave it to me to be the guy getting 'land sick' from the wave action. Yesterday at low tide I walked up to the pools I like to fish and like always I watch the water (guides call that ' reading the water '....mmmm....most of them can hardly read period...butt ....) and am looking for fish, bait , swirls and of course dropped money. Well I became a little woozy, far from the feeling when I nosed dived into the Playa a month or so ago but still very uncomfortable. I walked home concentrating on  balance and watching my feet. I didn't like that and it left me with a headache. So, call me complicated which I prefer but use hypochondriac if you must cause I just can't do it....I really can't. In the morning I've been walking 3 miles and stopping to do balancing exercises along with the eye exercises my buddy Bob sent me and it's helping. SO, dear Team Xers, until I return from injured reserve remember to eat your vegetables and play well together . Keep me in your hearts please and if any of you catch that 40 pound snapper I've been wanting please feel free to photoshop me in a picture of it.....I 'd do it for you.

84.5 kilos = 185.9 pounds....When I went into the gym at 49 years old and 240 pounds that was my goal. Lately I've hovered under 200 but with more exercise, way less of the demon rum and a side order of the Flu there I am....It's a miracle. That was days ago and now I'm kinda steady at 187....I seem to be achieving that ' fit senior citizen '  look....oh boy...

Yesterday after I safely landed back here at the left side of paradise I was telling our old friends Ken and Diane about me and MP's roving  International film festival . They said it's a funny story and that I should write about it...well Di, here goes and ya know I'll also take song requests anytime.....We Love the big screen and we Love the Platino theatre with leather recliners and food and beverages....( big tip, Nachos are really messy to eat in the dark )....So being in a foreign country we find movies that are subtitled , American with Spanish subtitles and of course this helps us with our Spanish but then....well...mmm...We go see a movie named ' Sentimental Value ' , It's about a Norwegian movie producer who wants to make a movie about his own families horror in W.W. 2 at the hand of the Nazi's and he wants his  actress daughter to play his wife who hung  herself in their home after the war.  And we figured all that out without one word of the good ol English language as it was a Norwegian movie with Norwegian dialogue and Spanish subtitles. Then a week later the movie MP has been waiting for arrives. ' Rental Family ' which is about an actor who finds work in Japan as playing real life parts in a variety of ways and....you guessed it ! A Japanese movie with Japanese Language and Spanish subtitles....So I'm feeling kinda international at this point, kinda worldly don't ya know.

That's how we're eating these days as I work through this balance problem that comes and goes...you ever see a pear that comes clothed ? You can get these babies at the Ley's new Fresh Food Market in Sabalo. The particular melon is a red one but weeks ago we got one that was yellow and seedless and me and MPeasy had to agree it was the best ever. Really .

And for your musical music feature of this Mile 14 edition we have 18 seconds of the Beetles...How can ya go wrong with the Beetles ?...Fun night at the theatre.

It's a balancing act

 Well, retired #003 is still not 100% after that little run in I had with neurology a couple weeks ago. My balance is just poor. Although I walk , fish and proceed with life I sometimes simply walk crooked, start veering off kinda . So I've found some exercises and MP is helping me to get back to normal, if there's a such thing at my age. For me the weirdest part is that it's shaking this iron confidence I've had my whole life. The day I was wallowing around on the beach was just soooo miserable that I'm kinda reluctant...I'll even use the word ' scared ' to go to far afield alone . I wonder what would happen if I couldn't walk home of get on a bus or....it bothers me. As I type our friend Donna is dealing with an episode of Vertigo and I've been through that a bit back when I was in the boat thousands of hours but this is not that. In the day Dr. Zuril diagnosed with the most common type of Vertigo B.P.P.V. , benign proximal positional vertigo. I would be actually dizzy and learned to stop the spinning by bringing it on by tilting my head to the sky, the more it happened the more it would fatigue . Now I just have poor balance . Like everything else, I just gotta move forward and for the time being I'm trying not to be that loner that I really am and stay around other people just in case.....does this guy look scared to you ?

We were at the market buying shrimp for MP and this was new stall we had not seen and decided we'd use  them, the stuff looked and smelled so fresh. Well it turns out that we were their first customers ever, very cool...VASA Seafoods in the South East corner of Pino Suarez Market @ # B 14 . 

The water is cooling off now and we're starting to see and catch fish . This Toro here came to a topwater and was just about all my medium sized outfit could do .  Surf fishing the critical moment is when the fish finally goes dry. Ideally it's when just the right wave rides it up the beach so if the extra tension causes a line failure or a dehooking you have a second to run down between waves and grab him before  he regains his freedom....and that's how it went this time.

My old friend Alejandro is not fishing as much and comes to the Playa on weekends . But you know me I always find the best people and I've been fishing with this man for weeks now and it's so weird, wonderfully weird. He has no english as poor as my Spanish is it's better than his English. We never use the translator and as I type this I realize I don't know his name . He like me and I like him, it's the human language we both speak fluently, my new friend . And that would be the cutest little Roosterfish you've ever seen that he's got .

On Sunday I fished during halftime like I usually do and lucked into a nice red one for him to take home and for comida . He said it was just right to cook entero just like we'd have at Loco's before my Ciguatera got so bad...man I miss that deep fried fish.

You know me , I gotta know all things fish. While we were getting MP's ocean fresh shrimp one of the stalls had Corvina, huge yellow tail Corvina caught in the Marmol area. Now I see the panga drivers sport catches all the time and never have I seen a catch like this from those boats....in fact the closes catch I've ever seen had to of been us fishing from the rocks north of Marmol when we'd have maybe 10 Corvina of which maybe 2 were like these.

On Sunday we do our hand holder hike, the ' up and over ' from the Faro into Olas Altas, 10 miles from the southern Bureau of Mile 14 . I never get tired of this hike and I hope to do it until I'm an old man , ya gotta have goals ya know.

Even a thumb on the lense can't spoil these vista's eh ? I'm a lucky man. Esa uno suerte para mi poder estar aqui y hacer esto .

I think I reported on my musical progress when I Mile 14ed the Jason Isbell song Speed Trap Town. Well I promised you a new song and it's a work still in progress but me and MPeasy recorded a new song by Jason last night. I'm really enjoying the challenge of drop tunings and learning to sing in different keys. I fumble a lyric or two...tha's how it goes with homemade .  Merry Christmas everyone ! 

Ciguatera

 I named this post  that so if anybody were to Google that and then find this blog and it helps them I would be very gratified. If even one person finds this and because of it avoids the horrible health effects that I've had I would feel wonderful...AND, it wasn't really my idea. Years ago when I first began to think I might be suffering from this fish toxin I googled and found a blog of a Fishing Guide in Australia who's age, work and lifestyle mirrored mine and he suffered terribly form Ciguterra for years . So here goes .

That Robalo there is about the finest eating you fish you can catch here in Mazatlan. I caught that fish right there at low tide about 2:00 pm Sunday and filleted it and cleaned it immediately taking special care to get ALL the red and blood out of the fillet. MP fried it in batter as usual and because I had not eaten ANY fish from the waters of Mazatlan in 3 years because I suspected I had the Ciguterra Toxin in my system I ate only I/4 of a fillet....and oh boy was it ever good .  I slept well, got up and had my coffee and read my papers and was on the beach at 6:00 am to fish . I wandered and fished my way down to El Cid and visited with my friends a bit and then decided to fish the rocks on the other side of our building . As I got back right in front of my building I felt kinda weird, kinda light headed and then the next thing I knew I had falling forward and couldn't catch myself from falling down . Then I fell several times trying to stand but finally got upright and floundered up to the foot shower of my building. Even as I sat there I couldn't keep my balance, I thought I was having a stroke was petrified. I called MP and she came running and as I recovered she and Alan our maintenance guy held onto to me to our condo unit. I immediately had to go to the bathroom and had severe diarrhea. Within two hours I could walk without help. Now 3 days later I'm just a bit unsteady but still having G.I. issues.

Ciguterra is the most common of a few Fish Toxins, 50,000 cases a year of which 15,000 are in the USA.  There is no test for it and diagnosis is made by the process of elimination.  It occurs between the two tropics, Cancer and Capricorn at 35 degrees north and 35 degrees south Latitude. Small fish eat the coral and big fish eat the small fish and we eat the big fish. The fish most apt to carry the toxin are in shore predator fish like Barracuda, Snappers , Grouper and Sea Bass which are much akin to that Robalo ( snook ) . The Toxin accumulates in the human system being stored in your fat cells. It is rarely fatal and effects different people in different ways. The amount of toxin in your system depends on your exposure  to fish, so people like me who catch, handle and eat fish as a lifestyle can be most affected. Some people it doesn't effect at all. 

The top pic is a Corvina which is Sea Bass. The middle pic is a nice big Pargo, red Snapper and the 3rd pic is our fishing team with a load of Corvina, some really nice big ones...the bigger the fish the more toxin.

As the years went on we realized that often after eating fish I would get sick, usually vomiting the fish up during the night. Many a time we had fish with other couples and I'd be the only one sick. Many nights after dining I would just feel queasy. Years ago a renowned fisherman warned me of the Ciguatera. He told me I was the perfect person to become infected with the toxin. I eat it at least once a week and through the years of I've handled hundreds of these fish and thousands of fish in general. An interesting thing is that once you have the toxin in your system the fish that makes you sick usually won't have the toxin but any fish you might eat can trick your system into releasing the stored toxin into your bloodstream .

Ciguatoxins are lipid-soluble and can be stored in the body's tissues, including fat, for a long time (months or even years). The symptoms experienced by individuals who "carry" the toxin (meaning they have residual toxin from a previous exposure) can recur intermittently, especially when triggered by certain factors like consuming alcohol, nuts/nut oils, or even more fish. 

Gastrointestinal symptoms

Nausea
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Abdominal pain or cramps 

Neurological and sensory symptoms 

Tingling or numbness around the mouth, lips, and throat, spreading to hands and feet
Sore muscles
Tooth pain
Temperature reversal: A sensation where hot objects feel cold and cold objects feel hot. This is considered a hallmark symptom.
Itching, which can be extreme and worsened by alcohol
Headaches
Dizziness
Fatigue or weakness
Difficulty walking
In severe cases, hallucinations or coma 

Important considerations

Symptoms usually appear within minutes to 24 hours after eating the contaminated fish.
Most people recover fully within days or weeks, but some neurological symptoms can persist for months or even years in rare cases.
There is no antidote, and treatment is supportive, focusing on managing the specific symptoms. It is recommended to seek medical attention for diagnosis and treatment.
Avoid alcohol and vigorous exercise, as these can worsen the symptoms.
To prevent recurrence, some medical professionals advise avoiding fish, nuts, and alcohol for up to six months after recovery. 
So now I'm having neurological problems that you see in the info. I have a friend here who knows Mazatlan and is a true waterman. He swears that my condition can't be ciguatera because he's never seem coral around Mazatlan...Well, it's obvious now that he's wrong. I think the fact that fish have fins to take them wherever they'd like might have something to do with the riddle of no coral....
The internet is a wonderful thing. If you or somebody you know seems to get food poisoning a lot and fishes the tropics....look into and try to head it off before you get to the point that I have. But ya know me, Mr Bright side, if I had been anywhere else than the beach and fell that hard I could of been really hurt.....so....no pescador zarenado, no pescador entero, no pescador diablo....I'm done with that ! 

• Ciguatera Fish Poisoning

  The larger the fish, the more ciguatoxin it contains. Symptoms of ciguatera fish poisoning include: * **Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea...

  

  NYC.gov
• Naturally occurring seafood toxins | Health - Queensland Government

  Jun 8, 2021 — What are the symptoms? Symptoms usually start one to 24 hours after eating a toxic fish. The time before onset of illne...

  

  Queensland Government
• Ciguatera - Canada.ca

  Nov 16, 2022 — What are the symptoms? Symptoms can occur within minutes, but generally develop within 24 hours of eating contaminated...

  

  Canada.ca

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