Cabo in November

Destinations · September 2026

Seven days on the southern tip of Baja, built around two decisions made long before the rods were packed: how to get there, and where to sleep. Both matter more to a fishing trip than most anglers admit.

Getting there: JSX

The flight to a fishing destination is usually the worst part of the trip. Rod tubes at oversize counters, two hours of security theatre, a cramped seat, and a bag carousel that may or may not produce your gear. For this trip we are doing it differently, flying JSX from Los Angeles into Cabo San Lucas.

JSX is a public charter operator rather than a conventional airline, and that legal distinction is what makes the whole experience work. They fly 30-seat jets out of dedicated private terminals rather than the main airport, which means almost no lines, no crowds, and no long waits. Because they are not a commercial airline, passengers are pre-screened instead of going through standard TSA security — no bins, no taking your shoes off, and you can show up around twenty minutes before departure. The cabin is single seats either side of the aisle, so nobody is sitting in a middle seat, and snacks, drinks and checked bags are included.

I should be straight about something: this is my first time flying them. Everything above is what they promise and what other travelers report, not what I have personally verified at 8:25 in the morning with a rod tube and a week of tackle. That review comes after the trip, and it will be honest either way.

What I can say is why it appeals to a mobile angler specifically, because the fit looks unusually good.

What matters if you are flying with gear

• There are no overhead bins. One personal item goes under the seat in front of you and everything else is checked. For an angler this is worth knowing in advance, and it is why the rod on this trip packs short: the X Max C-P breaks down into an 18-inch case that rides inside the carry-on. A rod tube would be going below.
• The standard fare includes two checked bags at up to fifty pounds each, and the refundable fare includes three. A rod tube and a gear bag both travel without an oversize argument at the counter.
• Gear underneath is handled lightly, so there is no fear of it being mishandled or missing the flight.
• Bags come off the aircraft and out to you by cart within a few minutes — no carousel. On a short trip, getting your gear back forty minutes faster is a fishing session you would otherwise have lost.

That last point is the real argument. On a seven-day trip, the difference between landing at noon and being on the water by three, versus landing at noon and reaching the water at six, is an entire evening bite. Travel logistics are not separate from the fishing. They are part of it, and semi-private is the first model I have seen that treats a short trip as though the hours matter.

If it delivers, this is how I want to reach every destination in their network.

The Rigged & Ready and the Legalis (7.83 feet) aren’t heavy enough or long enough for some of the species and sizes of fish Cabo can put on the line. So the packing is diversified. The Rigged & Ready, and hopefully the Legalis, travel in the cabin. The KastKing and the Tsunami go in a Plano Airliner telescoping case under the plane. That way I have gear on the heavy end, just in case I hook something big.

Flying also turns the lines upside down for the length of the trip there and back: the cutting tools that never leave my body get checked, and the working gear rides in the one bag under the seat.

Base camp: Hilton

Hilton is our preferred lodging vendor, and that is not a decision made for this trip. It is thirty years of traveling with the same company and having it work.

Conrad Hilton bought his first hotel in Cisco, Texas in 1919. A company that has been in the business of putting travelers to bed for more than a century has solved problems that newer operators are still discovering, and you feel it in small ways that matter enormously on a fishing trip — a front desk that is actually staffed at five in the morning, a property that will hold a bag between checkout and a late flight, staff who do not blink when you walk through the lobby with wet gear.

Thirty years is long enough to have tested that in a lot of places, in a lot of conditions, including some where things went wrong. The reason I keep booking them is not that nothing ever goes wrong. It is that when it does, somebody fixes it.

Why it matters more for anglers than most travelers

Fishing travel is hard on a hotel relationship. You leave before breakfast, come back sandy, and want ice at odd hours. You need somewhere to rinse gear and somewhere to dry it. You are often the guest asking for the thing the property does not normally do.

A long-established operator absorbs that better, and consistency across properties means you already know what you are getting before you arrive. On this trip that means two very different stays — a Hilton Grand Vacations club property for the first stretch, then a full resort for the second — and the transition is one less unknown in a week that will have plenty.

There is also the practical side of a loyalty relationship built over decades. Status earns the flexibility that fishing schedules demand: early check-in when a dawn flight lands you at eleven, late checkout when the morning bite is worth staying for. Those two things alone have saved more sessions than any piece of tackle I own.

The shape of the days

The week runs on a simple split: fish the edges, work the middle.

Dawn and dusk on the water. The first and last light of each day belong to fishing, and nothing gets scheduled against them. In Baja in November that means being in position before sunrise and staying until you genuinely cannot see your line. Everything else in the day bends around those two windows.

Midday for the work. Between roughly ten and four, when the sun is high and the water has gone hard and bright, the rods come apart on a table. That block is for tackle breakdowns, product reviews, photography, and writing up what the morning actually produced while it is still fresh enough to be accurate.

There is a reason the schedule works out this way beyond the fishing being better at the edges. Midday is when you have shade, power, a flat surface and air conditioning — which is to say, when you can do careful work. A hook sharpened at noon in the shade is sharpened properly. A review written at noon is written while the thing is still in your hand.

What gets covered in the middle of the day

• Tackle breakdowns. What went out that morning, what got used, what never left the bag. The gear that never leaves the bag is a finding.
• Product reviews under real load. Saltwater, sand, heat and repetition are a better test than any bench. A week of it tells you more than a season at home.
• Successes and failures, both. Fish caught, and fish lost — and specifically why. Lost fish are more instructive than landed ones and almost nobody publishes them honestly.
• Rigging and re-rigging. What broke, what corroded, what needed retying, and how the terminal setup evolved as the week taught us the water.
• Content for later. Photographs, notes and footage that become articles after the trip rather than during it.

The discipline is not fishing through the middle of the day just because you are on a fishing trip. Hard bright water at noon rarely produces, and burning those hours costs you the evening session you actually needed to be sharp for.

The itinerary

Nine days door to door, seven of them in Baja.

Arrival day is a scouting day

Nobody fishes well on water they have never seen, and the temptation on day one is to rig up immediately and burn the afternoon learning things you could have learned faster by walking.

So Nov 2 is deliberately a walking day. The plan is to cover the beach in front of both properties on foot — the club property where we start the week and the resort we move to later — and read what is there. Where the trough runs. Where the bottom changes. Where the rip sets up and on which stage of the tide. What the wrack line says about the forage base. Where the exits are and how far apart they sit.

Me and a slate, basically. Every observation written down at the time rather than trusted to memory, so that by the first sunset session that evening, and the first dawn on Nov 3, we are fishing a beach we already understand instead of guessing at it.

The one exception: if something is busting on the water while I am walking it, the slate goes in the pocket and the rod comes out. That is not indiscipline. Feeding fish in front of you are the single most valuable observation available, and you record them by catching them.

Nov 4: scouting the Hilton coastline

One full day of the trip is given over to properties we are not staying at.

The Los Cabos corridor holds a real concentration of Hilton properties, and they are spread across very different water. Cabo Azul sits on the San José del Cabo side. Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal sits at the Pacific end, on an entirely different kind of coast. The Small Luxury Hotels properties in the Hilton portfolio are scattered between them. Same booking account, completely different fisheries.

The point of the day is to answer one question at each stop: what does the water in front of this property actually offer, and would a week based here be a different trip?

What gets recorded at each property

• Beach type and gradient. Steep sand shelf, flat sand, rock, or mixed. This decides everything about what you can fish and how far you can wade.
• Access. Can you walk out at dawn from the room, or is it a drive? How far can you move along the beach before you hit a headland or a private stretch?
• Structure within casting range. Rock, reef, points, and where the bottom changes color.
• Exposure. Pacific side or Sea of Cortez side, and what the prevailing wind and swell do to it. Pedregal and Cabo Azul are effectively opposite answers to this question.
• Tide behavior on that specific beach, as far as a single visit can show it.
• Whether anyone is fishing it, and if not, why not. Resort frontage has its own politics.

This is the slate doing exactly what it is for. Six properties in a day produces more observation than anyone remembers accurately by evening, and the notes from this one day become the basis for choosing where to base future trips.

It is also, frankly, a good use of a loyalty relationship. Being able to look at a whole portfolio of properties along one coastline and pick the right one for a specific kind of fishing is a genuine advantage, and it only exists if your lodging is concentrated with one operator rather than scattered across whoever was cheapest that month.

The write-up from this day will be its own piece: a fishing-first read on the Los Cabos Hilton properties, beach by beach.

What comes back

A trip like this is worth more than the fish, provided you record it properly.

What gets published afterward:

• The JSX review, written after actually doing it. How the private terminal works when you are traveling with a rod tube, what the checked-bag process really looks like with fishing gear, and whether the time saved converts into fishing hours the way the theory says it should.
• A fishing-first read on the Los Cabos Hilton properties from the Nov 4 scouting run — beach by beach, what each stretch of water offers, and which property suits which kind of angler.
• Gear reviews under a week of real saltwater load, including the things that did not survive it.
• A full session log — every dawn and dusk window, with conditions, and what those conditions produced. That is the part that compounds. One trip is a story; five logged trips is a pattern you can fish from.
• The honest failures. Fish lost and why. Gear that disappointed. Days that produced nothing and what the conditions were when they did.

On the two names in this piece

What I do have is thirty years of choosing one of them on purpose, and real curiosity about the other. If the JSX experience is what it appears to be, semi-private becomes the default way this site reaches destinations within their network — and I would be glad to build something more formal with either company. But the review comes first, and it gets written the same way whether or not anyone is reading it from the other side.

That is the only version worth publishing, and frankly the only version worth partnering with.