San Felipe Fishing Reports and Sportfishing Vacation Information

San Felipe fishing articles, maps, fishing reports, peak seasons, hot spots, and vacation travel information for the top sportfishing locations of San Felipe, Mexico.

The San Felipe fishing area is located only about 50 miles from the extreme north end of Mexico's Sea of Cortez and it has a history full of interesting tales related to both sport and commercial fishing.

Just north of San Felipe is the mouth of the 1,400-mile long Colorado River which, before it was trapped behind hydroelectric dams, once had one of the highest peak flows all the rivers in North America.

All that Rocky Mountain spring runoff brought massive quantities of nutrient rich, brownish-red silt to the waters around San Felipe that may have have been the source of one Spanish language name for the Sea of Cortez, El Mar Bermejo, or the Vermilion Sea. (Another possible source of the name could have been the massive, sometimes vividly colorful plankton blooms common to the northern one-third of Sea of Cortez, which are caused by the combination of strong currents, nutrient-rich water, and bright desert sun.)

This Colorado River silt gradually built up an underwater "delta" area of mostly shallow water around San Felipe, with a soft muddy bottom that drops off suddenly about 50 miles south of town into the profound depths of the main part of the Sea of Cortez.

Looking at the monotonous underwater profile of San Felipe's fishing waters, one might be tempted to assume that there would not be many fish or other types sea life found in this fairly large, shallow, and relatively featureless area.

While it is true that major offshore sportfishing quarries such as marlin, tuna, and dorado do not generally swim as far north as San Felipe, these shallow, nutrient-rich local waters actually have been some of Mexico's most productive for massive quantities of commercially caught shrimp and a surprisingly wide variety of fish species, including the now endangered totoaba, Totoaba macdonaldi, an amazing member of the humble croaker family that grows to the size of a very respectable billfish.

Enormous totoaba, weighing up to about 200 pounds by some accounts and up to about 300 pounds in others, once swam and spawned in local San Felipe fishing waters in schools so dense they could literally be harpooned with one's eyes held closed. But like the once "limitless" bottom population of shrimp that also swam in the northern Cortez, the totoaba and many other fish species in the San Felipe area were reduced to just a fraction of their former number by disastrous commercial overfishing from the 1950s onward.

But San Felipe's fishing history, especially for sportfishing, was actually just getting started in the 1950s. Although it is true that a large and promising local sport fishing industry first promoted by Ray Cannon in the 1940s was wiped out along with the now almost extinct totoaba, San Felipe was also seeing the birth of its unique "panga mothership" sportfishing industry, which thrives to the present day.