Fisherman at Sunset

 Puerto Penasco is a small fishing village.  The village life revolves around fishing and the sea.  The fishermen have small boats with outboard motors and this is sufficient because the water is usually quite calm here. Most often they fish with nets.

For dinner, we would go shopping at the Old Port area - where the fish vendors have coolers full of freshly caught fish for sale.  This time of year they are selling flounder, octopus, shrimp,  pinto, rock bass, and what they called grouper (but which I do not think is what I would call grouper).  According to what I have read, there were huge fish in this area back in the 1950's and it became a very popular sport fishing area - in fact - the sport fishing is what attracted the Americans, primarily.

The big fish (I am not sure what species) were fished out - the population is essentially extinct.  After that, they started bringing shrimp boats in, and their nets destroy the shallow sea floor in this area so the big fish cannot regenerate because their breeding habitat is constantly being disturbed by the nets.  (or so I have read).

The shrimp they catch in these waters are really special - they are huge - jumbo shrimp.  Most of the jumbo's go to the processing plant and are flash frozen for commercial use.  We ate a lot of shrimp, though - this time of year the vendors had lots of them in their coolers and they are the best shrimp ever!