04/25/2026
Wendy Gunn and I are back on the beach in Baja this week with Grant Hartman, trying once again to land a Gigante Rooserfish from the beach.
Photo Above: Grant Hartman and Wendy Gunn, my two best fishing buddies wait patiently on a pristine beach in Baja—eyes fixed on the horizon, hoping for Mr. Roosterfish to swim within casting distance. Wendy and I consider this the very top of the game in fly fishing; nothing compares to the challenge of sight-casting to giant roosterfish from the sand. Every rooster caught off the beach counts, but the true chase is for the Grande—a fish over 30 pounds. And then there’s the Super Grande, the fish of dreams: a rooster of 60 pounds or larger.
If you truly want a Grande, you don’t go for just a day or two—you plan for a week or more. This week, Wendy and I will return with Grant for our third trip, hoping at last to put a Grande on the beach. It will likely be our final attempt; this is a young person’s game. Success demands strength and speed. Running down the beach in pursuit of a rooster provides a huge advantage, but at 70, my days of sprinting after them are behind me.
When it comes to roosterfish, everyone will tell you Grant Hartman is the man. He pioneered this obsession. I’ll go further: if Grant isn’t the most accomplished blue-water fly fisher on Earth, he’s certainly among the very few at the top.
Grant, a gr**go, grew up on the beaches of Mexico’s central Pacific coast. That’s where he and I began our saltwater fly fishing journey in the mid-1980s.
It all started with a few fly rods, a book, and two young bucks who lived to fish. Grant and I met serendipitously in a Scottsdale tackle shop, shortly after I began guiding at Lees Ferry. I was telling him about my recent month-long train trip to Mexico where I had journeyed to what at that time was a sleepy little village on Mexico’s central Pacific coast called Rincon de Guayabitos. He leapt from behind the counter and exclaimed, “No way—I grew up there!” A fast friendship was born, and before long we hatched a daring plan: the grand expedition to fly fish Mexico.
The place that Grant’s family lived had a small 12-foot aluminum boat with a 15-horse Johnson motor. We would launch that tiny boat through the breakers, taking our lives into our hands. We tried to keep sight of land, but the lure of “greener grass” and bigger fish just a little farther out was irresistible. I remember one day of endless rowing after the motor refused to start. We don’t claim to be the first to fish with fly rods outside Baja on Mexico’s Pacific coast, but we never saw anyone else—and have never met anyone who says they were there before us.
At night we wore thin the pages of Lefty Kreh’s Fly Fishing in Saltwater, learning knots and rigging. What we couldn’t find in Lefty’s book, we invented along the way. Those were the days—youth, tequila by night; fly fishing all day. We were living large.
Wendy and I had just met, and soon she was part of our saltwater escapades. We’d fish Mexico until we had just enough money left to get home, then return to work until the next trip. I remember some long, multi-day, grueling bus rides back to the border. The saltwater flyfishing addiction ran deep and lasted for years. Meanwhile, I co-founded Crystal Creek Lodge in Alaska, and our Lees Ferry business prospered. Yet we always found time to head south for a month each year.
In 1995, Wendy, another friend Dan Dryer, and I had the wild idea to open the first fly shop and guide service in Mexico. Busy running Lees Ferry Anglers in Arizona, we turned to Grant—living on the beach with his elderly father and the love of his life, Gisel—to move to Cabo San Lucas and manage our new enterprise, Baja Anglers. That’s another long story for another day.
Grant and Gisel Ramos P have owned Baja Angllers for years now. But every spring, Grant can still be found quietly staring into the clear blue Pacific, waiting for the shadow of the Gigante roosterfish to slide into casting range. And then, for the next 60 seconds, all hell breaks loose as Grant shouts: “Rooster! Let’s go!”
