Photos and Story by Jeff Berlin

The harbor at Cedros Island lies at the end of a two-lane road that’s partly paved and partly not. It leads right onto a service road that runs along a jetty made of stones about the size of a large dog. It was behind this jetty, which curves from the mainland in a semicircle to protect the harbor, that we dropped anchor after a day hooking fish in the lee between the island and mainland Baja, Mexico.

Across from our boat, hitched to the south end of the concrete service road, was a camouflage-green military fast-attack boat. It was perhaps 40 feet long with a remote controlled 50-caliber machine gun on its roof and a drug runner’s high-walled, fiberglass panga, or ocean-going skiff, the same length tied fast to its port side. Word is, the panga was found adrift in the Pacific about 25 miles north of the island, abandoned and emptied of drugs, most likely marijuana. It still had its four, 200-hp Evinrude outboards, though, and a huge polyethylene fuel tank to feed them.

“They’ll probably resell it right back to the drug runners,” cracked Palomino, the multi-talented Mexican skipper of Fish Magnet, a 62-foot Mickelson Yacht Sportfisher that was our home and fishing platform for these few days. Palomino hails from La Paz, an idyllic town on the Sea of Cortez, and had just sailed Fish Magnet to Cedros from San Diego, running nonstop and without sleep for 36 hours in punishing seas. He must have a cast iron stomach and a healthy cynicism, for corruption runs deep in Mexican politics and law enforcement, and I figure the panga’s been sold and resold more times than a Tijuana lady of leisure. .

From one Cabin Cruiser to the Next

I flew down to meet the Fish Magnet in a brand new Piper Matrix with my friend Steven Bernstein—an award-winning cinematographer who lensed movies like Monster and Like Water for Chocolate and flies a cute, blue-and-white Cessna Cardinal—and Mike Borden of High Performance Aircraft—an affable San Diego, Calif Piper dealer. The Fish Magnet is Mike’s boat, and the Matrix is his plane, and after a short stop in Tijuana to clear Mexican customs and take care of paperwork, we were nonstop Cedros, about halfway down the Baja peninsula and roughly 20 miles offshore. Neither Steven nor I really knew what to expect of the island, which is definitely not ready for prime time as a resort destination. As we descended for landing at the quiet strip, ragged ridges crusted in pine trees jutted up through a broken undercast looking arid, desolate, and right out of the Jurassic period. About 1,400 people live on Cedros Island, which save for the dusting of pine, is rocky in sun-baked shades of ochre and brown. Everyone lives towards the south end of the island, and apart from two small towns connected by a 10 kilometer road, the island is deserted, populated mostly with indigenous deer, donkey introduced by man and wrecking the ecosystem, and other furry and feathered things. Offshore though, the sea is teeming with life in the balance.

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