Mark Bucon’s plan is to spear fish at a spot along the Northern Baja coast known only to him and a few other guys. Five minutes before we arrive, he unties a black bandanna from the rearview mirror of his Toyota pickup and holds it out to me.

I think maybe my nose is dripping and he’s offering me a handkerchief. He reads the puzzlement on my face and explains, “I’m going to have to blindfold you.

I start to laugh, but the look on his face tells me he’s serious. “I can’t go back to the other guys who know about this spot and tell them I took a reporter down here unless I can say you were blindfolded,” he explains.

Three minutes after I’ve tied the bandanna around my head, I feel the car decelerate and move right to exit the toll road. A minute or so later, the pavement beneath the truck gives way to the world’s bumpiest dirt road. “You might want to hang onto something,” Bucon says as the truck rocks and bounces. Five minutes — or about 2000 dips and bumps later — Bucon stops the truck. “Disgusting, they’re burning trash over there,” he says, more to himself than to me. “Actually, maybe that’s more than just trash. That fire’s pretty big...and it’s coming toward the road here...and this is the only way in or out.”

We sit there silently for a few minutes while Bucon weighs the risks of proceeding to his secret spot; I stare into the blackness of the bandanna. Finally, he decides he doesn’t want to be trapped by the fire or be blamed for starting it by some- one who might have seen us drive down the road. So we turn around and leave.

“That’s Mexico for you,” Bucon sighs as we bounce back up the road. “You never know what’s going to happen down here. But that’s the kind of thing you put up with for good fishing.”

Back on the toll road heading north, Bucon, a soft-spoken, athletically built man, bald on top, with kind brown eyes, says, “There are other spots we could fish here in Baja, but I’d rather not stop until we’re back in the States. It sounds a little paranoid, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we were arrested and accused of starting that fire.”

If we were arrested, Bucon couldn’t expect the locals at his secret spot to come to his defense. They’d be more likely to testify against him.

“The first time I came down to this spot,” he explains, “a local fisherman — actually, he’s an urchin diver — he came up to me in his boat while I was in my kayak and said, and this is all in broken English, ‘Listen, this is my kelp bed. I want to protect it so it will be around for my sons. You Americans come down and you shoot all the fish and leave. I don’t want to see you around here anymore.’ I said, ‘Richard, first of all, I’ve got a Mexican fishing license, and, second, I’m not coming down here to ruin your kelp bed. I just want to do a little fishing.’

“So next time I came down, some friends and I drove a 19-foot boat that I own with a few other guys all the way down here. It took three hours, and we were cold and miserable when we got here, but we figured we could anchor the boat offshore while we were diving, and if there was any trouble we could climb back in and get out of there. So, we drive the boat down, and we’re in the water, and, sure enough, Richard comes up in his boat and says to me, ‘I told you I didn’t want to see you here again.’ I said, ‘Come on, Richard, I’ve been looking for fish like this my whole life. If you let me fish here, I promise not to come down too often.’ He said, ‘Okay, but no more than once a month.’ Well, the fish I’m hunting are only here for a few weeks out of the year, so I asked him if I could take all 12 days at once and not come back the rest of the year. He said no. Now what I do is I come when I want to, but I show up after 1:00 or so in the afternoon, after they’re done diving.”

It’s not just for any fish that makes Bucon drive all the way down here, blindfold his guests, and dodge overprotective locals. It’s the white sea bass. And not just any white sea bass. “I’m only going for trophy-size fish,” he tells me.

With his left hand on the steering wheel, Bucon fumbles around in the glove box with his right until he finds an envelope full of pictures. “Look through these,” he says. “There are some big ones in there.”

In the pictures, Bucon and others stand in wet suits holding by their tails white fish nearly as tall as they are, fish with big mouths and spiny dorsal fins. “That was a big one there,” Bucon says as I look at one of him squatting next to his green ocean kayak on top of which lies a five-foot-long white sea bass, “over 60 pounds. Caught it at the spot we just tried to go to.”

“Where do you find them?” I ask.

“They hang out in kelp beds, 10, 15, 20 feet below the surface. They like to sit just inside the bed on the side the current enters the kelp. You swim along on top looking for them, occasionally diving down to check out spots where it looks like a fish could be hiding. It takes an immense amount of patience. You can easily spend four or five hours in the water waiting for an opportunity to bump into a fish.”

“How close do you have to be?”

“The speargun,” Bucon explains, “has an effective range of only 20 feet or so, so you have to be close. The problem is, you don’t have a lot of time. One flick of their tails, and those things are out of your visibility. Sometimes, though, you catch them sleeping, just hanging out sunning themselves, and it’s easier to get close for a good shot.”

“What happens when you shoot it?”

“Assuming you hit it, the spear goes through the fish and toggles on the other side, and the tip comes off the spear. Then the fish runs. There’s a reel on the gun, like a fishing rod, with about 500 feet of line on it. With a big fish like that,” he points to a picture I’m looking at, “you’ve got to let it run and tire itself out. First of all, you’ve got to catch a breath and get your heart to slow down, because the adrenaline is pumping so fast through your system that your heart is racing. You really have to calm down. Then you have to try to think straight, because it’s really hard to think when the adrenaline is going through your body. While you’re doing that, the fish is weaving in and out of the kelp bed, wrapping around the kelp stalks, and as he’s wrapping around the kelp stalks, he’s going deeper. Many times they end up in 50 feet of water.

“So you have to swim with your gun through the weeds and try to follow the path of the fish, reeling in line as you go. You follow your line down as it weaves through the weeds. At first, the line is only, say, 20 feet deep. But as you get closer to the end, you’re going 35, 40 feet to follow your line. Finally you find the fish 50 feet down. So you try to get your shooting line straight above the fish and your speargun floating straight above the fish. The problem is, a lot of times, the line gets hung up. So you’ll go down and pick your fish up in 45 to 50 feet of water, and you’ll be coming up, and, 20 feet from the surface, you can’t get your line through the last stalk of weeds. It’s frustrating because you’re 20 feet from the surface holding a 60-pound fish, and you’ve got to let it go and it sinks to the bottom again. Then, after you get a breath, you’ve got to go back down and find out what’s hanging the line up, cut some more weeds, then swim back down to the bottom and find your fish, pick it up, and swim like a madman to the surface. Sometimes you’re down for a minute and a half. It hurts. The lungs are burning, and that first breath of air is the sweetest thing in the world.”

Not wanting to go home having done no fishing, Bucon decides to try the La Jolla kelp forests. Two-plus hours after being defeated by fire in Baja — including 15 minutes of searching for a place to park in La Jolla — we find a spot at the south end of Kellogg Park. The parking space is so tight that, even though I stand outside to guide him in, it takes Bucon three tries to parallel park the truck. The two kayaks protruding from the camper shell hang three feet over the hood of the Mercedes parked behind us. Removing them is a bit of a project, but we manage it without any scratched paint. We carry first his then mine down the concrete steps to the small beach just north of the Children’s Pool.

We leave the two boats and Bucon’s speargun sitting on the beach and return to his truck to put on our wetsuits. The short-sleeved, short-legged suit that Bucon lent me feels snug, but no more than his long-sleeved, long-legged one looks. In addition to the suit, Bucon also dons booties and gloves and a hood. From the back of the truck he pulls out for me an extra hood, attached to a nylon shirt. “I recommend you wear this too,” he says. “It goes under the wet suit.”

I feel like a dog chasing its tail as I try to grab the cord that hangs down from the wet suit zipper at the back of my neck. I finally get hold of it and jerk the zipper down far enough to get my arms out of the tight sleeves. As I put on the hood/shirt combo — which Bucon calls a “cheater vest” — I work my arms back into the sleeves and pull the zipper up.

Just then, a blonde life- guard in her early 20s walks up and asks, “Are those your kayaks down on the beach? Because you can’t launch there.”

Bucon looks bemused. “Why not?”

“You can launch at La Jolla Shores or south of the lifeguard station.”

“Why can’t I launch here?” he repeats.

“Because it’s rocky through here, and if there’s a strong surge, you’ll be on the rocks. It’s for your own safety.”

“Can you radio and ask if we can launch here this one time,” Bucon asks her, “because our stuff is already down there and it took us 15 minutes to find this parking spot and...”

Before he finishes his litany of reasons, she calls the tower on her hand-held radio and asks if we can paddle out where we are. I hear a voice answer back, “They have to launch south of the station.”

“You have to launch south of the station,” she repeats.

“What’s the number down there?” Bucon asks, cell phone in hand. The lifeguard gives him the number and he dials it. “Hi, this is Mark Bucon. I’m the guy with the two kayaks on the beach up here between the Children’s Pool and Boomers. Could we just launch here today since it’s exceptionally calm and our stuff is already down there and it took us a long time to park? We’ll come in south of the station and I promise to launch from there in the future.... Thanks a lot.”

Bucon flips his cell phone closed and says to the lifeguard, “They said we could launch here just this once.”

“Okay,” she says. “Be careful.”

Down on the beach, Bucon drags his green kayak into the water, just deep enough to float the boat, and climbs onto it. I pull my yellow kayak into the water alongside his, and, much more clumsily, climb on top. These aren’t the type of kayaks that you slide into, legs and torso inside the boat, head and shoulders above. You sit on top, and, consequently, they’re tipsy. But I manage to get on and sit down without going over. “I’ll follow you out,” I say.

Bucon paddles out, and I follow his path through the rocks. The surf is low today, and we glide over the top of the swells without incident. Once in the open water, we head northwest toward the large kelp bed about a half-mile offshore. After a few minutes, I find my rhythm with the paddle and am keeping up with Bucon. When I look back over my right shoulder toward La Jolla, the view surprises me. I’ve stood there admiring the view out over the ocean many times, but I’ve never until now considered what the view looked like in reverse. Basking in the golden-afternoon sunlight, La Jolla looks every bit the haven of wealth and privilege that it is.

By the time I’m done thinking that thought, we’ve reached the kelp bed, and Bucon stops paddling. For a minute or two, he silently checks a few shore reference spots and then says, “This is my spot. Conditions look really good; we should see some fish here today. Maybe not white sea bass, but we’ll probably see some yellowtail.”

He points to a spot about 50 yards to the north where a dozen seagulls circle and dive into the water. “See those birds working that area? That means there’s bait down there. The water is nice and calm, not too much wind, good visibility, bait. Good conditions today.”

Bucon leans forward and reaches into the water, grabs a bunch of kelp, and ties his bow line to it. I paddle ten yards away and try to imitate him, but I can’t do it and keep my balance at the same time. “Why don’t you tie up to the back of my boat” he suggests with a chuckle.

Even that isn’t so easy in the swells, which seem to jostle you much more when you’re sitting still than when you’re moving, but I finally manage to do it. Bucon then tosses me a pair of swim fins, a mask, and a snorkel from a net bag strapped to his kayak. As I gear up, he asks, “So have you ever snorkeled offshore or done any diving before?”

“Nope. First time.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot of balls coming out here.”

“I do?” I wasn’t nervous until now. “Why’s that?”

“Most people,” he answers, “get a little disoriented and a little sick when they first come out here. My guess is you’ll go for 10 or 15 minutes and start feeling a little queasy. If so, just give me a signal and we’ll get back in the kayaks.”

“I should be okay,” I say, not really knowing if it was true.

“Just let me know how you’re doing,” he says again, right before rolling into the water.

I pull my mask up and follow him in. The water is about 67 degrees, cool at first, but warm enough that I’m acclimated in less than a minute. After that, with the wet suit and hood, I’m more than warm enough. Bucon reaches up and grabs his speargun — which looks like a wooden combination of a crossbow, rifle, and fishing rod — off the kayak and, motioning for me to follow him, swims off to the north. I start to follow him, but he’s got a head start, he’s a better swimmer, and I soon lose him. I’m also distracted by what I’m viewing through my mask under- water. The rust-colored kelp sways in the current against a royal-blue background. Thousands of eight-inch silver smelt swim in and out of the kelp. After a while they’re swirling around me, glistening in the water-filtered sunlight, always just out of reach. I feel like a foreigner in another world — their world. Ten feet below the surface, smaller schools of sardines, also silver but a little bigger and lazier than the smelt, wander by. Occasionally, I spot a green-and-tan calico bass hiding under a kelp branch 15 feet down, and once a half-dozen or so shining silver lines appear at the limit of my visibility and then disappear.

I spend about 15 minutes watching this underwater world, breathing noisily through my snorkel, swimming in I don’t know what direction when the sound of Bucon’s voice stirs me from my reverie. “Over here,” I hear him say. I surface and look around, but all I see is the front side of one westward-traveling swell and the back side of another. “Over here,” he says again. It’s coming from my left, and I swim in that direction. Once over the first swell, I see his black-hooded head and mask. “Did you see that school of barracuda?” he asks as I swim up.

“Is that what the silver lines I saw were?”

“Probably. How are you doing, okay?”

“Great. I love this.”

“Good. Occasionally I’m going to give you the okay sign, and if you’re still okay, you give it back.”

With that, Bucon swims off again and I follow. This time I make a concerted effort to keep up. But after a while he dives down and keeps going down until he disappears into the blue beyond. I keep swimming in the direction I last saw him go, but I lose him. I don’t mind. I keep swimming aimlessly. The scenes beneath me are so mesmerizing that I lose all sense of place. I don’t know where I am in relation to land or the kayaks or Bucon, and I don’t care. I could keep swimming like this forever. But after a while, the duration of which I couldn’t tell you, Bucon calls me over again. “We’re a long ways from the kayaks,” he says. “We should head back in that direction. There are tons of bait fish around here,” he adds, “but I haven’t seen any yellowtail yet. They could be here; we’ve just got to find them.”

He swims off to the south and I follow. So far I’ve been reluctant to swim below the surface, but now, the first time Bucon goes beneath, I follow him. Immediately my snorkel and mouth fill with salt water, and I return to the surface coughing. Catching up with Bucon, I again follow him on a dive. An exhilaration comes over me as I leave the surface and swim down through the kelp forest, as if I were an astronaut step ping out of his space cap- sule and into space. About 10 feet down, the exhilaration is replaced by a creak- ing sound in my head and a sharp pain in my sinuses. Still, I stay down as long as I can. I’m sitting in some kelp reaching out — in vain — to touch a calico bass when something large and black 10 feet beneath me catches my eye. I turn and expect to see a seal or some other large, hopefully friendly sea creature, but it turns out to be Bucon swimming along 20 feet below the surface.

A little while later, I’m following Bucon to the kayaks, which I can see 40 yards ahead toward land. As he pulls himself up onto his and I’m swimming toward mine, seven barra- cudas — silver, slender, about two feet long, with bright yellow tails — glide by directly beneath me, about eight feet down. They look like polished stainless- steel knife blades.

I pull myself up on my kayak and awkwardly work myself into a sitting position. After kicking off my flip- pers, taking off my mask, and pulling the hood off my head, I look over at Bucon, who is sitting slumped over, his flipper-clad feet dangling over the side, his hood still on his head. “You did really well,” he says. “We were out for over an hour. I’m exhausted. I’ve been out seven out of the last nine days. Too bad we didn’t see any fish to shoot at. The conditions were right, plenty of bait fish around, just not the fish we were looking for. But that’s not unusual. I only shoot a fish one out of every five or six times out.