Lake El Salto’s Best Fishing Spots
Anglers Inn International provides every guest at El Salto with a map of the lake in their room, which they can take home to remember their incredible fishing trip to Mexico. It also includes a handy set of English-to-Spanish translations: “I want to go to the bathroom” may be the most useful, but “If I say it’s a 10 lb. fish, then it is a 10 lb. fish!” might be the one most frequently used.
El Salto is Jam-Packed With Perfect Structure and Cover
Once you’ve been to the lake more than once, it’s not that hard to know where you are at all times. Because of its heavy levels of fluctuation, it may seem different from season to season, or you may need to reestablish your bearings, but even at full pool it’s not a huge lake by U.S. standards. There are certain landmarks that are visible and obvious at just about any water level, and once you understand their relative locations you’ll never be lost again.
In my mind the lake has four main sections, and on any given day you could stay entirely within one of them and have a bang-up session. The guides usually don’t adhere strictly to that, but they establish a milk run to maximize your fishing during the session given the current conditions. Fortunately, you can fish everything from humps to trees to bluffs to points in confined areas. You don’t need to run from one end of the lake to the other once you establish a pattern.
The Official Names of Lake El Salto’s Best Fishing Spots
On the map that Anglers Inn provides there are certain areas that will be familiar to anyone who’s spent any time there. For example, in my opinion the former La Estancia Village is consistently one of the best zones for catching big fish. Several other villages whose residents had to move when the lake was impounded are also identified by name. Ask any of the older guides from the region and they may have walked the roads and path of those villages in their younger days.
There are at least two flooded cemeteries from which you can catch bass, but “Cemetery #2” up the lake is by far the more photographed one, even though it’s out of the water most of the time.
Every Famous Bass Fishery Has “Unofficial” Spot Names
Of course, every great (and even some not-so-great) bass fishery has names that might not have shown up on the original maps, or that may not be official, but that every serious local angler knows about. Here on the Potomac River, anyone can identify Aquia Creek or Mattawoman Creek or Arkendale Flats, but the anglers who’ve been around for a long time know about “Bitter’s Rocks,” a pile of old ballast rocks that Florida pro Jim Bitter cranked to win the 1992 Bassmaster Top 100. Some younger anglers may know it by that name, even if they have no idea who Bitter might be. Now it’s even on some maps, which is good, because before the rock pile was identified it almost certainly claimed a number of lower units.
Similarly, on the Red River there’s the “Bobo Hole,” named for former Alabama pro Dalton Bobo.
Okeechobee has “The Monkey Box.”
Sometimes they’re just shorter versions of the actual place name. When Champlain anglers say they’re going to “Run to Ti,” they’re referring to Ticonderoga.
It’s an honor to get one of these places named after you, and a sign of respect for what you’ve accomplished, although in some cases anglers would rather keep them secret so they can continue to have them all to themselves.
Some of Our Favorite Areas on El Salto
Over the years, Hanna and I have semi-inadvertently come up with our own shorthand for some of the places we regularly fish on El Salto. We didn’t do it to keep any secrets – because, really, there are no secrets among the guides – but rather as a way of telling each other where we’ve been when we fish with other people. Here are some of our favorites:
“The Hanna Hole” – Prior to our second trip to El Salto, Hanna’s personal best largemouth was 6 pounds 12 ounces. When we got there in May of 2013, we headed out for a few hours the first afternoon and she proceeded to beat that mark…and then she beat it again…and again, finally topping out at 9 pounds 1 ounce that day. Almost all of them came from an area where a large flat loaded with big trees dropped directly into a defined channel. We sat outside that channel and threw spinnerbaits, chatterbaits and swimbaits up on to the flat, rolled them back, and consistently got crushed – although all of her fish skewed a little bit bigger.
“The Tilapia Farm” – This uplake spot is pretty obvious. It’s where the biggest concentration of commercial tilapia fishermen store their supplies and their catch. It’s also the last deep water before the (non-Elota) side of the lake ends in a creek. Within a small space, there are house foundations, underwater points, an old bridge, rock piles, and just about any other sort of structure and cover you might dream about. We’ve had many of our best cranking days up there.
“Antonio’s Cove” – A few years ago in January our guide Antonio took us to a cove one afternoon that was dotted with various types of trees and bushes. Every one of them, it seemed, had at least one spawning fish in or next to it. Sometimes you’d catch multiple fish, as long as you could get a Senko, worm, jig or spinnerbait anywhere near it. I think we stayed in there for four hours. It was a good day in terms of low gas consumption.
“The Telephone Poles” – If you’ve been there, you know where they are, because they’re the only pole timber of this sort on the lake. They exist at the edge of a creek channel in an area where the fish tend to bunch up in the winter, and there are some rough spots and rocks all around. Get in ‘em and shake your moneymaker.
“The Channel Point” – Obviously there are a lot of points that drop directly into the channel on El Salto, because it is literally the textbook version of what a bass lake should be (the only thing it doesn’t have is submerged aquatic vegetation) but this one is particularly memorable to us. It stairsteps down to 10 feet and then to 50, with jagged rock and ridges throughout. One year in June we could go there late morning every day and it was absolutely lights out with a swimbait bouncing along the bottom.
“The Iguana Cliff” – There’s one bluff where we’ve repeatedly seen iguanas sunning themselves and then hiding in the crevices. I’m sure we could say the same about other bluffs if we looked a little harder. Even in that case, this one would always be identified as such.
On your next trip to El Salto (or your first trip, if you’ve never been there), see if you can figure out some of the places I’ve referred to here. Of course, some of them are quite obvious while others you probably won’t identify unless you see us on them. After all, you can’t swing a dead coatimundi around there without hitting a good piece of bass-holding water.
Just don’t fall for it when someone tells you they caught them on “Refrigerator Point.” You see, the commercial tilapia fishermen place their catches in discarded refrigerators up on the bank to prevent them from spoiling. They all tend to look alike. If you tell someone to “look for the white refrigerator” or “stop when you see the fridge next to the barrels” they’re not going to know which one you’re talking about.
