Fishing in Mexico: Safety Revisited

​It remains as true as it was when we first visited El Salto in 2009, and when I first wrote about the topic three years ago: When potential travelers ask about fishing in Mexico,  their first question is almost always, “Is it safe?” That’s especially but not exclusively true when you talk to people who haven’t traveled much, and particularly if they haven’t done much international travel.

My answer almost always remains the same: “I’ve been there over 20 times and I haven’t had a single problem.” Nor have any of our traveling companions. For that matter, nor have any of the hundreds of other anglers I know who’ve gone there.

That’s not to say that it couldn’t happen, but it does serve as something of a rebuttal to the naysayers who are convinced that there’s a bandito waiting to ply you with fentanyl and bullet holes around every corner.

Now watch this video from my friend Matt Pangrac, who went to El Salto for the first time in December.

I talked to Matt a couple of times before he went, and he kept repeating that several people we both know, who are otherwise reasonable and educated, urged him NOT to go. They feared he’d come back in a body bag, if at all. If you watch certain news programs, read certain documents, even try to assess official statistics, those might have been logical conclusions. They affected Matt’s thought process, delayed his first visit. After a single visit, those analyses seemed to him completely wrong.

He could go back again and have a problem. Just because you flipped a coin 20 times and it came up heads all of those times doesn’t mean that it’ll be either heads or tails the next time around. And I certainly understand that having an issue on foreign soil, especially if you don’t speak the language or have a support system in place, could compound the problem substantially. But the message I take away from Matt’s little rant is that hearsay and suspicion, like dock talk, is inherently unreliable.

You can’t really begin to get a taste for whether you will feel comfortable in a place until you’ve been there, and if you’re 100% percent convinced ahead of time that it’s unsafe, you likely won’t go, not giving you an opportunity to be convinced otherwise. Mind you, I’m not telling you to go anyplace where you’ll be uncomfortable, because that’s a recipe for having a terrible time even in the best of conditions. What I am saying is that those of us who are on the fence, and leaning toward going to a place we’ve never visited before, need to make informed decisions. That may mean drowning out those who are simply scared.

You’re always dealing with imperfect information, and there are no guarantees of safety anywhere (remember, most accidents happen at home), but the key is to find the signal among a lot of noise.

We’re headed back to Mexico this year, and hopefully every year thereafter.