Somos America

We are America. Mmmmmm, with that as the Carnaval theme it  seemed like the USA part of America was kinda under represented except for us parade followers , I mean even Miss Barstow California wasn't even there like she'd been in the past. But I guess the emphasis was on Latin America and this wording rang through out.

To Victory and Freedom of the peoples of Latin America

And it was a very impressive float, I'd vote for the best.

We got there early so we could get a good place to sit on the seawall , MP's new knee as good as it works doesn't like to stand still. So we were early enough that we got to see the traditional pre parade parade of business floats. The Fresca guys had the bubble machine going pretty good but it didn't seem to bother the army.

We picked out a great place and as the crowd swelled and we were out of location options we see a banda looking for a home...yup, they sat up right next to us. Oh man, a cacophony of sound, my ears are ringing just like they did when I spent 2 hours in the front row of a Bachman Turner Overdrive concert. Now you know I'm a music guy but this was over the top. As the parade got closer more and more Banda's were looking for Real Estate to augment all the other bands from floats, crazy....here's our Tuba guy and Banda.

As I dwelled on our good fortune I started to see Tuba's everywhere....mmmm....it's like the Tuba capital of the world and I actually like the soft bass thumping of the instrument, it's that bugle that kinda gets to me....throw in a little banjo and you got the trifecta of obnoxious instruments. We even got imported Tuba guy from Culican.

After about an hour and a half I could sense they were running out of gas so at a short break I got the horn guys have a beer and then they were so awe struck by the float carrying Banda Recodo ( the most famous Banda in all of Mexico ) that they finally shut it down....amen...

The Bano's is big business during Carnaval. Most generally to get rid of your Pacifico it costs 10 peso and a short line at any of the water closets up and down the Malecon. We were on the ocean side and MP was the first with the urge so she went to a Mariscos restaurant down the stairs on the beach. Well, their price for the Banos was 20 peso but if you were a customer it was free so for a 15 peso Pacifico you were a customer and everyone was happy, especially MP.....she's feeling like she'd pulled off a business coup with that beer she's holding. So for helping us out Marisco's Fisherman, we'll see you soon, I promised to come back and drop some real lettuce for helping us out.

Here's a pic of the Queens float, no Miss Barstow ( I miss her ) but we had our own Queen of Sinaloa. One thing I really like is the way they always honor the past Queens, my pictures didn't turn out but I love the salute to the elders. I remember at an Alaska Board of Fish meeting years ago one of the more dufus Board members asked about what it takes to be an honored Elder...he said if you're older you're elder...I like that now that I'm an elder myself.

I hope all you Mile 14ers know about the Knights Templar. I'm finding out they were and are everywhere. Of course they were responsible for the buried Treasure on Oak Island and there's a rumor that Knights Templar artifacts were found by Apollo crews on the moon, that is if you believe the moon landings really happened. So I shouldn't have been surprised to see them sail right into Mazatlan Carnaval 2020. 

My favorite float was the dragoons. I don't know what the Game of Thrones has to do with the celebration of Latin America but I like it, makes sense to me. Amazing how intricate the work on these guys was, I'd love to buy him for the boat launch, be kinda cool to have him next to that 6 foot long salmon I got sitting on a tree stump.

My really favorite float even before my other favorite was Cuba, They had all the cool Cuba stuff, Baseball regalia, Rum and Cigars, dancers and a real, and I mean real 57 Chevy. The Chevy was a 2 door of course and it was all decorated in Cuba motif. The rumor was that it is powered by a Dodge slant 6 motor hooked to an Alison tranny with a Pontiac posi traction rear end.  The dashboard is Volkswagon and there's a Bose 400 watt speaker in the trunk....what a ride ! Hows about those daylight headlights, safety is no accident .

This float is coooool. I don't know what the message was so I'll just add my own....it's the bird of peace.

Here's a pic of our adventure crew....Ruben and Candace are great world travelers, no sniveling, adaptive and curious. And it doesn't hurt that Candace has pretty good Spanish. 

We are always impressed on how mellow and wonderful the Mexican people are. Banda blaring in your ear, no worries, kids standing on a 20 foot drop off seawall, no worries. We've never seen one problem at any of the 15 Parades we've gone to and for the first time we saw our first presumed criminal. They walked this guy handcuffed by us and even he was about the most courteous hand cuffed guy I've ever seen...those things always make me kinda mad, but not this guy.

As we walked out we ran into Green Woman and I really wanted my pic with her. But she was just to tired, she'd had her pic taken close to 400 times and she just couldn't go for anymore so maybe next year Green Woman....and thanks Mazatlan for a Wonderful Night !

mmmmm, hows about a ...I know, a fish story

Yesterday I went fishing for Bass at Lake Pichachos with my Friend Dan, who fishes harder than ANYONE I've ever met. People tell me that I'm a hard guy but compared to Dan ol guide #003 is a piker. He tells me he's always been that way whether it's with fishing or business or whatever...I'm just glad I never had to work carpentry for him.

So it's up at 3:30 and at the lake for sunrise. with all the hundred, maybe thousands of trips I've done the sun up at the dock is always my favorite part, anticipation and the mystery of it just sets on the water along with the morning fog.

Now the boat I've lived half of my life in is a 21' ft Alumaweld with a six foot beam and 32 inch sides. With the high thrust Yamaha 50 on it it will do a steady 15 mph....Dans Bass boat is a 16 ft. Tracker with 20 inch sides and a 6 ft beam and 115 horsepower of Mercury and she does a breath taking 50 mph...so, I don't have to tell ya that getting used to going that fast and sitting so close to the water is going to take a few trips. I got the giggles pretty good as we flew across the flat calm lake.

Years ago for conservation I made a deal with Bill Dance that I'd lay off the Bass if he'd lay off the Salmon. Well, after I caught the first one of the day and he jumped so well I have to say that I'm going to be chasing these guys more in the future, catch and release of course.

As you can see it's really early and I still have my windbreaker on from high speed commute to work. We did some jerk bait fishing , we threw some Texas rigs and even tried those Magnum Wiggle Warts that were Bass lures until we discovered that they drive salmon crazy. Then as the heat of the day came around we fish a deep drops offs on a cliff with Lizards that we pitched, it was the best fun but....it was getting hot. In this pic of the biggest for me of the day I had put my pants back on because my legs were frying...

Dan tells me he frequently fishes sun up to sundown and has a nap at mid day under a shade tree...in the boat of course. I tell him the boat has a motor on it so it can take you someplace with a bed for that nap. He says I'm whining, I say I know and then I offered to show him my boat operating skills on the way back to the boat launch, which we did about 2:00, I'd call that a full 8 hour day, Dan would call that missing a chance for a 100 Bass day which I guess we would have achieved if I hadn't had a pizza party to go to. Did I mention it was mucho caliente ? Here's the boat being cranked on by Jamie our new support system and hows about that temp on the mirror...About the time I snapped the pic of the temperature Dan told me I was driving him crazy with all the pictures and then he power chugged 3 bottles of water....mmmm.....now who's crazy ?

Nets....it seems like my fishing is haunted  by the guys who get the wheat while guys like us get the chafe. I watched this guy run his net and and he had no Talapia but did have 2 bass. The nets are everywhere, in some places all the way across a bay from point to point. I don't know how the Bass survive just as I often wondered how the salmon survive and I guess now with just a bit of history behind me I'd say that most often in the long run they don't. At one point I had my jerk bait tangled in the net and it was a real mess and then my buddy handed me a pair of scissors and tells me it happens all the time....man oh man, I got a weird pleasure out of using those scissors on a gill net.

Speaking of nets ( hows that for a segway into a new topic ? ) the Alaska Board of Fisheries is done with the every three year Cook Inlet meeting and after decades of ignoring the growth and needs of sport fishing we have finally made some progress. without explaining the details we have seen a reallocation of fish, away form the commercial guys to favor the sport and personal consumption users. It's fantastic and for all of you in Alaska who read Mile 14 thank you for keeping the faith and not giving up, we're moving forward finally.

And in the fishing Karma department here's a pic of my friend Tom Welle and his grandson Hunter that I took this morning. We've missed a year together so when they showed up we chatted as Tom got Hunter set up to fish. I went back to throwing and was a couple hundred feet down the beach and watch Tom finally walk to the water and make his first cast....AND....walla, he's onto something huge. I hustled up the beach with my gaff hook but wasn't really needed. I think it's the biggest Pargo I've ever seen surf landed, good things happen to good people, it's that simple.

El Life

It amazes me that some people that have such a good  life that they don't seem to notice , maybe that's a good thing because they're just to busy...but me, I got a great life and I daily reflect on it and thank MP and the world. Many , many, years ago I had horribly defining thing happen in my life and it took only about 25 or 30 years for the dust to settle but when it did I decided to do my best to appreciate and savor this gift of life...and that's what we did yesterday, today and going to do tomorrow. BUT, first let me get the business part of this blog over with, the fishing report. ...Well, it's cold. I start the morning with temps in the 50's but there's plenty of snook around. Just yesterday I lost yet another huge one before we left for an adventure and I caught several in the week. My friend Tim Lockwood caught the biggest Pargo of the year and I'm embarrassed to say I don't have a pic due to facebook/blogger issues. Here's a few pics , us with our friends the Radkes from Kenai river Alaska and hows about the sunrise rebound we had after the last storm blew through,,,magic,

That's a pic of me at 5:45 Saturday morning...ya gotta want to do it ! And the reward,

The Lockwood's are here and Jen was interested to do the first Friday Art Walk so they met us downtown at the LaSiesta Hotel where we like to escape for a night every so often. As life in Jeff's world goes at check in I told a young man that we live in Cerritos but routinely come to the Hotel for a refresher night. Well, his name was Moses and he said his dad does Finger Paints at the Cerritos Market and I said " you're Antonio Lopez's son" and sure enough he is the son of one of the founding father of Team X and a wonderful friend of ours. So after many good laughs he gave us the keys to room 214 which turned out to be the only suite in the Hotel....mucho gracias Moses, you're the best.

The Art Walk is cool...but a real extension of the ' happy wife, happy life ' philosophy. So me and Tim talked cycles, fishing, carpentry and just wiled away the night as the girls went from gallery to gallery. At one gallery which was of course my favorite we got a shot of Tequila and engaged an educated guy about U.S. expansionism and Mexican History.  Here's MP and Jen and then a pic of Tim as he walked circles in the street kicking rocks while waiting for his wife to unload the check book.

MP had won 2500 peso on a Super Bowl board so I new this deal was going to take some time. Everywhere we went we ran into people we new and THATS a cooool thing. Our friends Grace and Gill were selling their Sea Glass art at the same place I took this pic of the Zebra. I asked the painter if anyone had every gotten Vertigo looking at her Zebra....she said " just you ".....mmmm, well she wasn't being snobby but she sure could do a great imitation of it.

When I told MP ' there's that glass of wine you've been wanting ' and we staged this pic the ' artist ' said that if I didn't buy it she'd have to charge me for the pic...but she wasn't being snobby just a kind of confrontational type of sense of humor, lots of people got that....right ????

How about an oil paint of Olas Altas with the LaSiesta in the lower left...Note to blog, next time take ear plugs, the party on the beach never ends but the weirdest thing is the people cruising the drag. They do it from round-a-bout to round-a-bout just like we did on Helena Avenue in High School. But, we didn't have any guys that were alone in a sedan with the trunk open to expose 4 foot speaker boxes fueled by 300 amps of  juice....and then there's the Razers...and them Harley guys, don't they sell mufflers at the Harley store ?

And we found Hugh Hefners Groto....just a few things missing but still really cool.

We had Mariscos at a beachfront place called Barracrudas. It was pretty funky and once again kinda short on gringos. I had a Crab tower tostado with raw shrimp and octopus and MP had a really cute octopus pizza and Tim and Jen had fried shrimp. I enjoy a good Tequila, usually just a shot before supper and this place had,,,,well,,,,none, Compadre for the price of Cazzedores, it's  the only thing about that place that needs fixing.I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when we were treated to a great fireworks show as sat on our balcony for some late night people watching. Perfecto, what an end to a great day.

How exciting. We got up this morning to do our walk in a new place. We headed over to Zaragoza Park for the organic Market and MP bought some excellent hard cheese. We didn't stay long, after Art Walking and Organic Strolling I'd had just the right amount of touchy feely...I'm gonna save the universe because I'm the center of it kind of people.

So we decided to size up Ice Box Hill and then go up and over that baby. Everyone in Mazatlan knows the huge mountain in the middle of town with all the Cell Towers and houses that seem to be glued to the cliffs.  We start out walking neighborhoods and then neighborhoods within those neighborhoods as we look up and run out of roads along the base of the mountain. Pretty soon we have just cement trails and little looky see spots,

It's really early so as we move along we whisper to each other. we finally look up and around every alley and possibility and finally spot the stairs that we new had to be close. At one point we had the biggest and loudest rooster you've ever seen cacklin away 2 feet from my face. I was worried about MP's new knee but she said it's all good, carry on.

Strictly OSHA approved. MP said going up was alright but she was hoping we'd find a road for the way down....well we didn't. Here's the top and the pic of the tower will tell all you Mazalatecos where we were at, it's place I always wanted to visit.

Of course there was a road at the top but, it went back to the north from which we'd come. So there was only one thing to do and that was find the trail and stairs. Now this next set was a little intimidating, real steep, really high risers with a narrow foot tread and of course no hand rails. I offered to go below MP and belay her but she trooped on....slowly and safely. It would have been really easy to do a Carl Wallenda on these babies.

It was probably the equivalent of about 15 stories according to MP's app...So it was just like we like , interesting exercise together. On the lower levels we actually came across handrails....

 So we go to La Fonda de Chalio for breakfast on the ocean. We've eaten there many a time and the gardens  they have attract bees which always freak me out but this morning they were everywhere....they were landing and leaving the table and even on my food. And of course people that know me know that I'm highly allergic and have had  a couple really scary bee stings here in Mazatlan. Sooooooo you can only imagine that as I confessed my discomfort MP just said " hey , there's nothing they want from so just ignore them ( easier said than done ) . Then on my second or third whine she opened this pack of Smuckers Strawberry Jelly and put it 5 feet away from me to bait this insect that Ty Tobias always tells me is so important to the food chain away from our table. It got creepy real fast....but, one of my mantra's is.....' you just gotta want to do it '