LJWorld.com

On Mexico's Baja peninsula in late July, I got two very important lessons in how to fight big fish.

Never mind that the only four big fish I managed to hook whipped me in short order. I lost each of those battles for four different reasons.

The lessons that sank in came by observing an angler I didn't even know fight a 40-pound dorado on relatively heavy tackle, and then watching experts teach a 14-year-old girl how to apply maximum fighting pressure through a fly rod.

The young lady was Haley Havelock of Sacramento, Calif. She was fishing with her dad, Matt. It's not polite to ask young women how much they weigh, but I'm guessing Haley at about 90 pounds, maybe a tad less.

She happened to walk past a late afternoon Temple Fork Outfitters conclave where some of the best fishing minds in America gathered after each day's fishing to debate the most miniscule of issues.

Buzz Bryson, a contributing editor for Fly Rod & Reel magazine, had just tied a spring scale to a palm tree and was testing a TFO rod to see how much pressure it could exert on the deeply rooted "fish."

It didn't take long for the California girl to rise to the challenge. Like most anglers, Haley tried to exert rod pressure with the rod held almost vertical. About two or three pounds of pressure was all the rod would handle.

Luckily, Rick Pope stepped in and showed Haley how to hold the rod at a much lower angle, pulling sideways to best whip a fish.

The Dallas resident founded TFO. Pope's mind is like a sponge that's spent years soaking up every imaginable detail about fly fishing and fly fishing equipment.

"The rod's power lies in the rod butt, not the rod tip," coached Pope. "As the rod angle goes toward 90 degrees, the amount of pressure you're exerting declines. You're working just as hard when the rod is vertical, but the rod is not working for you and you're bringing very little pressure to bear on the fish."

Rather than bringing the rod tip up, as most anglers tend to do, Pope showed Haley how to keep the rod tip no higher than 45 degrees. By jamming the rod butt into her stomach and leveraging with both hands, Haley cranked the fighting pressure up to nine pounds.

She watched carefully while a couple of old salts gave the rod a workout. Dan Blanton, a barrel-chested California fly fishing veteran, put 21 pounds of pressure on the rod and had onlookers scurrying for cover in case the 9-footer shattered under the strain.

It held together for Blanton. Then Haley stepped back into the fray, first pulling the spring scale to 14.2 pounds, then, finally, to 16 pounds.

"If you can put 10 pounds of pressure on a fish and keep it there, you can beat any fish," said Pope. "You have to keep the pressure constant and not give the fish a chance to rest."

What I noticed about the low rod angle was the bend in the rod's thick butt section. It doesn't take much resistance to bend a rod tip. There's a reason rods are tapered toward the tip. That taper creates a flex that enables the fly rod to load under the weight of a fly line and cast the line forward.

With conventional rods, a flexible tip also contributes to rod sensitivity, enabling the angler to detect a subtle bite. More fly rods are broken from fighting fish with a high rod angle than for any other reason.

The poor technique even has a name: "high sticking."

Two days later and 30 miles offshore in the Sea of Cortez, our fishing boat got a radio call from a nearby boat that was battling a big dorado.

They needed to borrow a gaff to land the fish, so we idled alongside and tossed them ours. We could see the deep fork of the 40-pounder's tail about 10 yards from the boat.

We backed away to watch the action, certain it would take less than five minutes to land the fish. Unfortunately, the angler fought the fish with a perpendicular rod angle, meaning he put very little pressure on the powerful fish.

Thirty minutes later, they gaffed the big dorado. I'd bet money that Haley Havelock, less than half the size of the exhausted fisherman, could have boated the dorado a lot quicker.