Even after many years of traveling to fish, the whole process of tipping my fishing guide still makes me nervous. Like most of you, I don’t want to be known as a cheap sonofabitch, especially since I intend to return to many locations. Even if I don’t intend to make repeat visits, a sense of fundamental fairness leads to believe that tipping generously is the right process. No one ever made the world a worse place by tipping too much.

Reading about Deacon Sebela’s trip to Lake Picachos reminded me that it’s extremely fun to bring newcomers on a bucket list bass fishing trip – whether they’re just new to Mexico or new to fishing. There’s no better way to get someone excited about the sport than to have them catch the fire out of a bunch of Mexican largemouths while being treated like a king or queen.

Whether you’ve done this trip a thousand times, or it’s only your second visit to the Mazatlán airport (see our arrival guide here), there are a few things that’ll make your departure go more smoothly. Having done this nearly 20 times, we’ve made all of the mistakes, so you don’t have to.

Lake Picachos is Mexico’s newest destination bass fishery, and while it’s often considered a “numbers” lake it has produced quite a few trophies and personal bests. It sits in Sinaloa, less than an hour from the airport and about two hours from famous Lake El Salto.

If you’re as anal and compulsive as I am about scheduling, you probably have some big trips planned for the long term future. I don’t mean the deposits-paid-written-in-ink kind of plan, but rather a general expectation of something to come.

After nearly 20 trips to Anglers Inn El Salto and Picachos, we tend to take some of the most basic details of the trip for granted. Nevertheless, we’ve used this website as a means of answering the most likely queries that you might have. Remember, there’s no such thing as a “dumb question” if it helps you have a better vacation.

Since most of the year you can be on the water before 6am, if your package includes a last-day half-day, that gives you plenty of time to fish – if you take a few steps to make it happen.

A day at Anglers Inn is designed to start before sunrise and end after sunset, making every minute count. It’s packed with full glasses, full bellies, lots of stories, plenty of camaraderie and, well of course, FISH….lots of them.

I have a severe case of FOMO (fear of missing out) so it’s lucky that Anglers Inn provides the only “Combo” that matters at this stage of my life: Two similar but distinct lakes that both offer great service and great food, but which can fish differently on any given day.

If you’re traveling to catch a new species, unless you’re exclusively a trophy hunter and you’re willing to blank, go someplace where you’re going to get a lot of bites. That may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often travelers disregard it. They’ll go to a fishery that has “some” smallmouths or “some” muskies and target those lesser fish, rather than either targeting the predominant species or going someplace that actually has numbers. Then they’re surprised that they don’t succeed.

Anglers Inn President Billy Chapman Jr. knows he can’t control the fishing, even on the best waters in the world, so he makes an effort to exceed expectations in any way that he does have control over. He doesn’t tolerate employees who don’t buy into that game plan, and it shows. Everyone who stays around is constantly hustling.

It took us about two seconds to reach the executive decision to extend our El Salto trip through the holiday (which was about 1.99 seconds longer than it should have taken). As Hanna has written, it’s our home away from home, and the staff have become our second family. Nevertheless, neither of us had ever spent turkey day outside of the U.S. We had no idea what to expect on the “Dia de Gracias.”

Billy Chapman Jr.’s motto has always been: “Service is our focus.” That extends to eating, too. The staff wants you to be well-fed and satisfied. Accordingly, they’re willing to go the extra mile to make that happen.

This Thanksgiving Pete and I were supposed to drive to Chicago to cook, eat, relax, eat and eat again on a long overdue visit to see family and friends. We were scheduled to be in Mexico from November 14 to 21, but that wouldn’t give us time to quarantine or get a COVID test, so we made the decision to not make the drive. This will be my fifty-third (!) Thanksgiving and for each and every one I have been thankful to be surrounded by close family and friends.

I figure I’ve been to approximately 25 countries, but my niece, who is almost 15, has likely been to at least as many, probably more. Most of her earliest memories came while living in Tokyo, she spent last summer at Oxford, and she’s made it her goal to visit every country on earth (good luck with North Korea, Yemen and a few others). That may not happen in the post-COVID-19 world, but she’s off to a damn good start.

Well over 80 percent of Anglers Inn’s business consists of repeat customers. In our trips down there we see many of the same people over and over and over again, some of whom have been coming for over 20 or 30 years and visit up to five times per year. So if before you depart you’ve already decided that you want to return, you should start preparing ASAP. Prime dates get booked up quickly, and particularly in the era of COVID lots of rescheduling filled them up ever earlier than usual for 2021.

I want everyone – and especially women – to be cautious, but I also want them to have a chance to experience the great fishing at Lake El Salto and Lake Picachos. I’ve been visiting Anglers Inn properties since 2009, and while there have been a few women in our groups, historically they were mostly or entirely male, except for me. Back in June of 2017 I decided that listening to all the men jibber jabber about all the fish they caught, how they caught them and how many beers they drank was getting old -- we needed some more lady anglers in the mix.

Potential guests often ask us which lake they should visit, or whether they should go to both. There’s no hard-and-fast rule. People assume that El Salto is the “big fish lake” and Picachos is the “numbers lake” but we’ve seen weeks where that has been reversed. The single best numbers day we’ve ever had was at El Salto, and Hanna’s PB to date is the 9-12 that she caught at Picachos.

Have you ever seen someone waltzing onto an airplane with just a paperback book, a small tablet, or perhaps nothing at all? I’ve always wanted to be that guy, someone who travels light and doesn’t seem to miss anything, but the truth is I will never be that guy. I’m an overpreparer, a true belt-and-suspenders type.

Many of the fishing packages offered by Anglers Inn include a half day on the water, either on the day you arrive or the day you depart. For a variety of reasons, it’s most likely to occur on the front end, if at all. If you’re already in Mazatlán, it may not be a problem to arrive in time for lunch and a full afternoon session, but if your plane arriving and you’re headed straight to the lake, you’ll need to be efficient if you want to make it count.