audsley

Slow down a bit. In normal times the Black River is running too high and fast to be fishable until late April or May. Your lures/flies won't stay down and it's a little fast for feeding. There's a website that proviides stream flows. Right now it's showing a very low flow rate of 25.4 cfs at the pump station, but I suspect that rate will pick up when snow melt starts pouring in. Someone in the north country might have a better feel for current conditions, but here's the site. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/az/nwis/current/?type=flow I always went in the summer. Never heard of anyone fishing in the winter but won't say it can't be done. Summer thunderstorms will turn the water too muddy to fish by late June or July, but it clears again about October. Expect to see bears and protect your food. You might have good luck with Senkos or crawdad imitation lures. Note that the Point of Pines/pump station area is only reachable from the San Carlos side. You need their permit which used to be $20 per day and probably still is.

Forums in general have faded in popularity. Azfly&Tie is another that isn't what it used to be. This forum is doing better than most. In fact, it's become my primary source for fishing news. There's a lot I'd like to know about the state's fisheries and how they're managed, but AGFD gives fishing low priority.

Deer hunters with Unit 33 tags should know that the gate to Buehman Canyon has been locked at the Redington Road and will remain so until someone does something about it. This is the main access to a major canyon and surrounding drainages and has always been used by a substantial number of Unit 33 tagholders. . If you hunt anywhere in 33, this could impact you even if you don't hunt that specific area. The many who normally hunt there will now need to go somewhere else in 33. This road has historically conveyed sportsmen through 10 miles of prime mule and Coues deer country terminating at the Brush Corrals on Coronado National Forest Rd. 4407. From there you could hike toward Evans Mountain or up Buehman, Burro and Diablo canyons. Some Coues hunters preferred to stop outside the forest boundary and hunt the mesquite/palo verde country. The road was closed by a private landowner who recently acquired two pieces of private property. We don't need to hunt their private property. What we need is access to state trust and federal lands we're being locked out of. One parcel is along the road, where the gate has been installed. The other parcel is crossed along the edge by a short stretch of the road. These small private parcels are tying up thousands of acres of public land. Presently there is no access for Pima County, the state, Game & Fish, the forest service or the public. A county official told me Pima County, which paid $1.55 million for conservation property they need to monitor, will try to negotiate with the landowners for administrative access, but not necessarily public access. The state land department and forest service need to monitor grazing leases on the state and federal land, and the feds need access to fight forest fires. I'm afraid the land agencies will just take care of themselves getting keys from the landowners. The rest of us will be left out unless somebody does something about it. Anyone interest in getting involved in this fight should PM me and we can exchange contact information.

Piety Hill - i used to go in that way, but Buehman Canyon is several miles long, and the road past Piety Hill doesn't get you very far in. You'll need to start walking when you hit the bottom of the canyon downstream from where most hunters go. It isn't a practical alternative. I see no connection between the number of tags G&F allocates to 33 and a private landowner closing off the road. This particular landowner has a history of locking hunters out of state and federals over in Unit 32. As for other alternatives, I suppose you could also hike 7 or 8 miles down from San Pedro Vista. I know guys who have done it. But that's not a very practical alternative either. Access by the old road already afforded opportunity for very challenging backpack hunts in various directions. Now those opportunities are gone at least for now.

Heat hit the most important point. Highway 2 has been a game-changer since the 1980s and carries a lot of traffic nowadays. Historically it was an unpaved road with cars going much slower than today. Now that highway is an important truck route. Combine that with the fact that pronghorn get very little real protection or tangible support down there and crossing the border just isn't good for them anymore. It wish it wasn't that way, but that's how the biologists tell us it is.

I became a 6.5x55 enthusiast 20-25 years ago and still own three from that era. My attraction stemmed from the relatively light recoil that makes it ideal for wives and boys in their early teens. It packs a lot more punch than a .243 but, at comparable velocities, has only about 5% more recoil than the 6.5 Creedemore that's been all the rage in recent years. Your barrel looks a little short. The 6.5x55 favors slow-burning powders and does better with longer barrels. The 96s were made with a 2-inch step-down near the muzzle based on a short-lived theory that it would dampen vibration. I sporterized one with a surplus Mauser Obendorf barrel I bought for $20 in the mid-90s. It came 23 inches long, but I had the stepped-down end cut off leaving 21 inches and re-crowned it. I cold-blued it, put in a Timney trigger, oil-finished and glass-bedded a Harry Lawson thumbhole stock and mounted a 3x9 Bushnell 3000 Elite scope. After all that, it shot 1 1/4 inch groups on a good day. It kept up that level of accuracy out to 200 yards, but the groups spread quite a bit at 300. It seems to de-stabilize as it slows down. I've wondered if the shortened barrel could be part of the problem. I suggest keeping velocities around 2400-2500 for 140-grain bullets. The Swedish steel was excellent for its time, but you'll want to be careful about receiver setback. Have the headspace checked. As for the longer throat, I've read that the Scandanavians don't bother trying to load close to the lands. Unless the rifle shows signs of being a real tack-driver (unlikely), I wouldn't bother either. Cock-on-closing never bothered me. If your initial range trial is encouraging, there's plenty of stuff out there on the internet about the 6.5x55.

Has anyone successfully used the $25 premium feature yet? I bought it two weeks ago for my upcoming hunt in SE Az where access is spotty. The premium version is supposed to show locked and unlocked gates along with some other things. There are no clear directions for using it. After calling G&F in Phoenix, I learned that it has to be accessed through my portal. But the lady helping me couldn't pull up the premium features either, so she handed me off to an IT guy who it turns out has only been working there three weeks and has never used it himself. He transferred me to a game branch manager with an answering machine. I'm waiting for his call back now. Since I have no idea when I'll get a call back, I thought I'd ask if anyone here can tell me how to use this thing. I'd like to plan a scouting trip for tomorrow morning.

Got my call back from the IT branch chief. The people were very helpful, but as a product review I'll have to say RAA 2.0 is one star out of five in its present stage of development. The map isn't populated with locked and unlocked gates unless you do it yourself. The vision for the RAA map is a pretty good one, but I feel it was marketed to the public before it was ready.

Whaaaat? I thought you'd forsaken Lobos for Cabo. And those are some really nice groupers. Sweaty time to be in Lobos, so you earned those fish. Whose boat did you fish out of, if you don't mind me asking?

It's a classic Western movie out of the 1930s and 40s. Slick operators attempt a land grab. When the people stand up to them and say no, they send their lawyers to get the court on their side. If Finchem would just grow that mustache a little longer, he could start twirling it for effect.

I watched the video over the weekend. The Republicans disgraced themselves with factual errors, half-truths, mangled logic and opinions presented as facts They insisted that sportsmen opposed to their bill simply don't understand it. But in trying to explain it, they've now provided video documentation that they don't know much about public lands, hunting, public access or anything else relevant to this subject. None of the legislators arguing in favor of HB2210 showed enough aptitude or foundational knowledge to be messing with a subject this big and important. If incompetence isn't damning enough, they also revealed their extraordinary dishonesty. They insisted that they have no intention of selling off BLM or national forest lands, and they'd like to put that rumor to rest. But several GOP legislators, past and present, have told me in person that they do in fact intend to sell off some of it, and they've gone into detail as to why. In recent years some have been quoted in news accounts proudly announcing their plan to turn public lands into taxable private land. That was before they gradually came to understand that the public doesn't want it sold off. Now they're saying it isn't, and never was, their intention to sell any of our public lands in the first place. They will always remain public lands, they said. Yeah, right. They also denied planning to put the lands in a trust similar to our present state land trust, which would place legal restrictions on access and use that we don't now have with federally managed lands. This contradicts what they were promising our state school superintendent and the public a year ago when state control of public lands was suddenly going to fund our schools in grand fashion. Rep. Travis Grantham, who claims a family connection to ranching and, therefore, special knowledge in these matters, asked what I thought was a really strange question. He mentioned the "checkerboard" issue and asked prime bill sponsor Mark Finchem whether transferring federal lands to the state could help alleviate this problem. Since checkerboarding involves only state and private lands, it's hard to see how a transferring federal lands that aren't part of the checkerboard would have any relevance. Rep. Finchem said yes, it very well might, but didn't offer any explanation as to how. I believe he was as stumped as I was. I could go on and on picking apart more of the nonsense that was spoken last Thursday, but anyone strongly interested can look at it here. There were some pretty good comments from the five or six citizens who spoke against it. I especially appreciated a Mr. Weed (or something like that) who supplied something that's been missing from other commenters. He let them know this is a cold, dead hands issue. And for some of us, it is. http://azleg.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=13&clip_id=20197&meta_id=492462

Minnows are best where you're allowed to use them. They aren't allowed at Patagonia Lake. Not sure of any other places where they might not be allowed.. Otherwise, Stanley's suggestion is a good one. Also Kaelin jigs in either John Deere green and chartreuse. And let us know where they're biting.

You don't have to be all that deep to catch fish that size. Here's a gulf grouper I caught in maybe 70-80 feet of water. A clam diver who was with us said he's seen as many as 10 that size on the same reef all at once. These yellowtails were about the same depth. This leopard grouper was in no more than 30 feet of water. All that said, it's true that there are more 100-120 pounders out deeper especially around underwater caves. But you can do pretty darned good within a couple of miles of shore. That video points out some of what's wrong in the Sea of Cortez. Long liners and net fishermen are taking tons of fish every day and earning poverty-level incomes. Consider how much they could earn guiding sport fishermen to catches like that. And then there's the hospitality business that goes with it. Cleaning and packing your fish, serving you grilled seafood on the beach and providing pangas, motors and whatever fishing equipment you didn't bring can be an experience sport fishermen would love and the locals would find much more profitable. Maybe they would even develop a conservation ethic, similar to what we have in the US, where limits are agreed upon and enforced by the local fishing/guiding industry. Under present conditions, it's every man for himself and the fish stock, although still adequate, is declining.

OK, while I was typing I wasn't seeing Heat's post. Looks like he's already discovered Tom Albers and that Tom has bumped up his rate a little.

I'm aware of one hotel that's operating, but I wouldn't choose to stay there. I suppose you could "post up" in a dirt lot like Trophy Hunter did, but I'd want to know who owned the lot and maybe talk to them first. Would hate to have to move camp in the middle of the night. There's another building that was going to provide lodging for the Sinaloan pangueras who came seasonally to Lobos, but plans changed after most of the Sinaloans stopped coming. Before that, the Sinaloans were ruining the place as they had no adequate housing or toilet facilities. The beach was their toilet and the tide was their sewer system. They were getting on nerves in Lobos and in Desemboque too until the local strongman up there finally had enough of them and had some locals pour gasoline on a couple of their boats and set them on fire. The Sinaloans got the message and haven't been coming for a couple of years. Fishing got a little better, and the beach got a little cleaner. At any rate, the second "hotel" had been intended to accommodate the now-departed Sinaloans. I heard there were plans to turn the building into an ice house, but I never saw much progress. I haven't been there in a while so don't know what's happened lately. There are indeed two stores, and one of them serves lunch. Last time I was there the lady in the back cooked me up some shrimp with garlic and butter with a side of rice, and it was outstanding, not to mention cheap. The menu is pretty limited, but I'll go there again next time I'm down. You can camp on the beach just north of town. There are some palapas there. I never see anyone camping there, although I know people who have. It's a public beach and gets daytime visitors, people driving over from Caborca I believe, so I'd be a little nervous about going out in a boat for several hours with valuables left at camp. I only know of a couple of houses to rent, but I hear that's going to improve soon. On the other hand, you hear a lot of things are going to happen soon in Mexico, and then they don't. If you have an RV you aren't afraid of getting stuck, that will work too, but there's no RV park. If a more high-end trip is to your liking, you can arrange a guided trip with Tom Albers. Google "fishing Puerto Lobos" and you should find his web site. He'll take you down from Phoenix on a Thursday morning, fish Thursday afternoon to Sunday weather permitting and bring you back on Monday. You stay in his house and he feeds you the whole time. Last I knew he charged $450 per person for the whole trip. You can put together a group, or he will. You can also rent a nice beach home in Santo Tomas and drive 40 minutes to Lobos each morning. Not much to do in Santo Tomas, but it beats driving down from Rocky Point. There are also a couple of Americans who guide out of Santo Tomas. Final tip: the locals in Lobos advise us to stay out of Desemboque. There is other economic activity in the area that doesn't involve ocean products, and most of the pistoleros are holed up in Desemboque.

Trophyhunter, I just sent you a PM.

The problem with planning fishing trips in the Sea of Cortez is in predicting the weather. Trust me, you do not want to be fishing from a panga when the wind gets above 10 mph. Check the forecasts on Windfinder.com. They're pretty accurate. This is an activity that definitely favors retirees like myself. We can go or cancel spur of the moment, and if the wind kicks up while we're down there we can stay ashore and wait it out for a day or so. . A 5-day trip to the Penasco-Lobos area could be a great time. If you're serious about fishing and can handle another four-hour round trip down to Lobos and back, you'll catch more and bigger fish and a wider species variety. After catching grouper, red snapper and yellowtail, I've come to regard trigger fish as pests that get in my way when I'm after the good stuff. I know people who will take you out for no more than you paid in Rocky Point.

Much truth has been spoken by various people here, but Thom C hit it dead center. They want to make the lands we hunt and recreate on available to developers and land speculators. And why not? Some of the legislators pushing this idea are in the real estate/development business themselves, the people who develop and sell real estate are far more politically active than the recreating public, and they contribute more money to campaigns. Should anyone be surprised we're getting pushed aside? Private interests and the politicians who carry water for them have been trying to do this for the past century. Every few years they make another charge at it, and each time it fails. But they only need to succeed once. Their biggest weapon is the myth that Arizona and other Western states would be better off financially if all the national forests, BLM lands and wildlife refuges belonged to the state. That claim does not survive close inspection. I know because I've studied it thoroughly. If the land grabbers succeed, many of our hunting areas will be sold off to private developers. Until it's sold, we can expect to pay high fees (similar to Indian reservations and private ranches in Texas and elsewhere) to hunt on lands we pay nothing to hunt on now. The average guy will be priced out of hunting. Here in the West we have something special that people from elsewhere envy. It will be lost if we don't fight to protect it. One of the co-sponsors of this bill, a Tucson Republican, once told me that most people don't care about hunting. He's right, unfortunately. Which means those of us who do care need to fight just that much harder.

The first Facebook link shows a bunch of women on a panga watching the Orcas jump. If I hadn't just seen those same pictures today (Arturo sent them to a friend of mine here) I would have questioned whether they were actually taken in Lobos. That's because two things you never see in Lobos (or didn't used to) are Orcas and American women. I saw you were joking that maybe an Orca would eat a sea lion. I'm told that an American fishermen just saw that happen down there. I hope it was the one that ate my Rapala. I need to get down to Lobos in the winter some time. The latest I've ever been is late February and March, and I've only seen finback or gray whales.

I got a Cannon through Home Depot delivered to my house for around $1200. They run sales at times. I'm very satisfied with it. Has both electronic and mechanical lock. Someone mentioned gun length. My Swedish Mauser original with a 29-inch barrel won't fit, nor will my pump shotgun without breaking it down. Additional advice: When choosing how big a safe to buy, think about more than just guns. Best binoculars, spotting scope, expensive cameras, savings bonds, passports and so on can go on the top shelf.

I have to agree that Junior is pretty impressive. Trump Sr. should stick to real estate and let his son get into politics. His son actually shows some aptitude for it. But for now, realize that putting Trump on the GOP ticket guarantees that Hillary will be our next president and that she will appoint Supreme Court replacements for Scalia and eventually Ginsburg. The question of whether the 2nd amendment confers an individual right will be back in front of the court, and this time the gun grabbers will come out grinning. What amazes me is that primary voters in both parties are telling pollsters that "can win in November" is much less important to them than "shares my values." I'm not sure I know, or that anyone knows, what Trump's values really are, but running him for President is a sure recipe for electing someone who really, really doesn't share their values. Trump tells us he loves the under-educated, and he should. That's where most of his support is coming from. The train wreck appears inevitable. We're headed toward at least four more years of liberal idiocy that will have today's Trump supporters fuming and blaming everyone but themselves. H.L. Mencken said it almost 100 years ago: "In a democracy, the people get what they deserve. And they usually get it good and hard."

Since this thread has drifted into presidential politics in general, I'll make the following observations before returning it to our principal concern, which is losing our public lands and free hunting access. Donald Trump cannot be elected president. At this point it looks unlikely that he can even get a delegate majority. The 35 per cent or so he gets in primaries is more than anyone else gets, but it's not a majority. Many Republicans, possibly about the same number who support him, will not vote for Trump under any circumstances. Some Republicans are even planning to vote for Hillary if Trump does somehow manage to get the nomination. Hillary could probably beat him while sitting in a holding cell wearing orange. But our concern should be with this movement to privatize national forest and BLM lands, or to transfer ownership to the states who will sell them off. ALL of the major GOP presidential candidates except Trump (a broken clock is right twice a day) have favored this move. It's an idea that has firmly taken root within the Republican party and has now metastisized into its bone marrow. Our job is to communicate to others, especially GOP politicians and party activists, that this is unacceptable and that the GOP should dump this idea immediately and try to pretend they never entertained it. Otherwise, the Boquillas pricing you're seeing now will some day look like a really good deal as the rest of your hunting opportunities will look like this (Ted Cruz's state). http://www.king-ranch.com/operations/hunting/pricing-info-booking-status/

No, but I'll look into when I can. Will probably choose to PM you when I found out. This is definitely a local issue.

I've been keeping a close eye on this situation. 520HUNT is correct in everything he said except for the part about no hunting in this area. The forest service sign and web site are not clear that the prohibitions only refer to target shooting, but that's all they are talking about. You can continue to jump ducks anywhere in the pass except, I believe, for "The Lake" on the road to the Bellota Ranch headquarters..

I recommend a Cooper Excalibur in .280 Ackley Improved if you can afford it. You're looking at just over $2,000, but once you've got the scope on it you're through. Cooper guarantees 1/2 inch groups at 100 yards, includes a copy of the target that was shot with your rifle and tells you the powder and bullet type (Sierra Matchking HPBT, etc.) and weight that did it. Up to you to figure out how much powder to use and the primer. I believe there are a couple of Cooper dealers in the Phoenix area, or you can go on Gunbroker and pick one up for a $40 FFL transfer fee and no sales tax. My seller is in Pennsylvania and actually paid for the shipping. But you will need Warne bases and rings, which sets you back about another $100. Cooper has a reputation for being pricey because they also make $7,000 rifles with incredibly beautiful walnut, but their synthetic stocked rifles are quite reasonable. I recommend .280 AI based on it's incredible efficiency and suitability for long range. Using my Nosler manual, I see that the classic 7MM Remington magnum needs 63.0 grains of IMR4831 to push a 160 grain Accubond at 3,008 FPS. The 280 AI will do 3,005 FPS at 57.0 grains of the same stuff, or 10% less. That's noticeably easier on your shoulder and your powder budget. And any time you can achieve the same results with less recoil you're probably going to improve your accuracy. Factory loaded .280 AI exists, but it's pricey. Best to reload.