Steve Merlo: Duck hunting in Mexico a five-star adventure
| Sunday, Feb 22 2009 02:07 AM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 01:22 PM
Bakersfield residents Andy “Tequila” Paulden, Jon Tkac, Paul Anspach, Robb Stewart (also known as ‘Señor Rub”), Roger Greiss and I flew to Los Mochis, Mexico, last week for a duck hunt.
Major airlines and I do not usually get along, but I do like complimenting good service when I see it, and our carrier, AeroMexico, had it together. We were not charged for overweight luggage or extra baggage, and the flight attendants offered free non-alcoholic drinks, cervesa and snacks.
Of course, when one travels on a duck hunt, one looks for decent accommodations, but I was thrown for a loop when I found out our stay would be at a downtown 5-star-rated hotel. Owned and operated by Bobby Balderrama, the Plaza Hotel became our headquarters for five days of hunting, dining and enjoying the top-notch services he and his staff offered. As part of our package, we ordered off the menu at breakfast and dinner, enjoying such delicacies as huge butterflied shrimp, steaks, wild duck, fresh seafood, nice wines and, of course, tequila, either in shooters or margaritas.
Each evening upon our return to the hotel, we were greeted by a waiter with a table of crispy tortillas, guacamole dip and freshly made margaritas. We also sampled a ton of different brands of tequila while we were in town, and it was, to say the least, an interesting experience. I learned, for instance, that straight tequila won’t cause a hangover — unless you drink too much of it.
Los Mochis is a modern, agricultural-based metropolitan city of a half-million or so hard-working people, very much like our own cities. We found the natives to be pleasant and friendly and saw no hint of the problems their country suffers in the border towns up north. Even on our hunting forays, we never felt anything but secure, and we hunted many miles from “home” each day.
Travel time to the hunting areas ranged from 20 minutes to an hour each morning and afternoon in modern, 10-passenger air-conditioned vans. Most of the staff spoke fluent to broken English, and we never had much in the way of language barriers. We literally hunted dawn to dark each day, with only a brief respite at lunch, so we were unable to enjoy much, if any, sightseeing. When I return, I fully intend to remedy that situation by booking another day or two.
The hunting areas were huge expanses of tidal marshes, rife with wildlife, waterfowl and shorebirds. Pink flamingos, white and pink ibis, pelicans, avocets, stilt snipes and a myriad of other species kept us entertained between shooting at the many flocks of ducks drawn to our decoys.
Travel on the marshes was by airboat — powerful, propeller-driven craft holding four to eight people and their gear and able to skim across mudflats with surprising ease.
Of course, the one problem we encountered during our adventure was typical of a lot of Mexican engine-driven machines — lack of proper maintenance and a shortage of spare parts and batteries. We spent several hours either stuck in the mud, out of gas, out of electricity or just plain broken down, but our guides always managed to get us going and back to the launch. All the breakdowns and problems occurred on Friday the 13th, so maybe it was to be expected.
We decided not to go through the hassle of taking our own shotguns with us on this trip, and instead rented dependable Beretta and Benelli autoloaders for a reasonable daily fee. The guns are cleaned and examined daily by the hotel’s own armorer, Jesus, who kept our guns in tiptop and working order with no jams during our stay.
Before we left I had some reservations about our safety, thanks to our stupid news media blowing everything completely out of proportion. Mexico is a large country, and most of the problems people have heard about on the news are due to over-zealous reporting about problems in drug-infested border owns, like Tijuana. We saw lots of 2- and 3-year-old barefoot children running around their little villages wherever we went, and most of the older kids were very clean and impeccably dressed for school.
The Mexican people serving us make little money on the clock, and instead depend on tips for their meager family income. We obliged without complaint, because the 40 or 50 bucks per person each day was well worth the money. The guides pushed themselves to excruciating physical limits retrieving our birds in mud so thick that the TV program “Dirty Jobs” would be a laugher down there, and the hotel staff always went out of there way to make us feel welcome.
Without a doubt, which I had before, I’ll be back as soon as I can. The hunting and escape from the rigors of our jobs are just too good to be true.
