Grant Wiswell, over at Castaway Films, has quietly put together one of the more moving fly fishing films I’ve ever seen. The film’s story centers on Danny Para’s journey to become a marlin guide in Magdalena Bay, while dealing with plenty of life’s vagaries. From a father who walked away, and feeling lost in life, Danny’s entire story is on full display in the film, giving it that much-needed depth and relatability that’s so often missing in fly fishing films. The Light Beside Me isn’t just a stoke reel for someone’s once-in-a-lifetime trip to chase marlin on a fly rod. It’s a real story, told beautifully, that just happens to feature fly fishing.
We had the chance to sit down with Wiswell to discuss what went into making this film, from both the technical and human viewpoints.
Flylords: Your film opens with some incredible shots of marlin underwater. How difficult is it to get shots like that? What goes into pulling off those sorts of shots?
Wiswell: The underwater filming ended up being one of my favorite parts of the entire project—but it didn’t start that way. I had some real trepidation about jumping off a perfectly good panga into a thousand feet of water. The first day I got in, I refused to swim more than five feet away from the boat. That doesn’t work very well when you’re trying to film bait balls.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to swim toward the sardines – and as luck would have it, they immediately used me as cover during a massive dorado blitz. I lost a chunk out of my left leg and took a few hits to the face in that swirling white vortex. And on my way back to the boat, about ten feet below me, a Bryde’s whale cruised past and ate the entire bait ball. None of that was great for a novice’s confidence.
But when I saw the footage later, I knew underwater work had to be a major part of the film. The sardines are the heartbeat of Magdalena Bay. The way the marlin, dorado, and everything else interact with them is so wild and so beautiful that I couldn’t tell the story without putting the audience right in the middle of it.
From that point on, every time I returned to Baja, I pushed myself further. I got more comfortable in the water, spent hours and hours shooting, and eventually decided to get scuba certified just to access the angles and approaches I needed. A team in Missoula helped get me ready, and thankfully, Baja is a lot warmer than Flathead Lake in the fall.
Technically, I had a steep learning curve. We’ve used underwater housings in previous films, but once you start going deeper, pressure affects everything—buttons stick, dials don’t work, the camera behaves differently. I had to work with the housing manufacturer to make sure the rig was actually usable at depth. And then there were all the classic underwater headaches: autofocus issues, white balance shifts, jittery footage, too much motion, blown shots. Every mistake you can make, I made it—usually more than once.
But by the end, things clicked. I was finally getting the kind of consistent, usable shots that really shaped the final film.
Flylords: Let’s talk about the dorado shots – those fish eating flies on camera. What went into setting those shots up?
Wiswell: Magdalena Bay is one of those places that never feels the same twice. Every trip is a new experience. We spent three different fall seasons there—2023, 2024, and 2025—and each year had its own personality. One of those seasons was an El Niño year, and with the warmer water came the dorado. The numbers that year were unbelievable—almost plague-level. In the other two seasons, we barely saw a single one, but during El Niño, they were everywhere, incredibly fast, incredibly aggressive, and constantly beating the marlin to the sardines and the flies. It made marlin fly fishing really difficult.
The dorado pressure was so intense that we finally decided to pivot and build a whole section of the film around them. We caught so many that the real challenge became positioning the camera to actually get usable footage. Eventually, we broke the hooks off and fished a hookless fly. That allowed us to get the camera in tight with minimal trauma to the fish.
I was originally worried the dorado would be spooked by having a diver in the water, but that wasn’t the case at all. Many of those takes happened within a foot of the lens. A few even hit the camera because they were so locked in on the fly.
Another fun part of filming the dorado was using the drone. In Magdalena Bay, you get two kinds of bait balls: static and dynamic. Static bait balls are perfect for underwater work because you can actually stay with them. Dynamic bait balls—where predators are pushing the sardines across the surface—are nearly impossible to follow underwater, but they are an absolute blast to film from the air. Tracking the erratic movement of a dorado blitz with a drone felt like playing a video game.
The challenge, of course, is landing a drone by hand in big Pacific swells. I’m not going to lie— there were some bloody fingers during takeoff and recovery. Technically, it was a demanding section of the film, but I’ve never seen footage like what we captured. It was incredibly satisfying to chase something new and come away with shots that feel unique.
Flylords: How did you meet Danny, the main character of the film?
Wiswell: I’d never told a human-centered story before. All of our past films focused on remarkable species, wild destinations, or environmental issues—like the Pebble Mine project. The first time I went to Magdalena Bay was for something completely different: an exploratory shoot for roosterfish in May of 2023. Danny happened to be the captain of the boat. We started talking and instantly connected.
I’ve lived in Ecuador for two years and spent a big part of my life in Latin America, so speaking Spanish was both helpful and necessary for what this project eventually became. On that first trip, Danny shared that he had been fighting an aggressive form of cancer and had recently undergone surgery and chemotherapy. We talked about the challenges he faced from that initial treatment, and we kept in touch throughout the summer. The plan was always to return for marlin season.
But during that summer, his cancer came back. He needed another surgery and more chemotherapy. Wanting to help, I reached out to several doctors in Missoula to understand his options and then had long conversations with two surgeons in La Paz. His second surgery went well, and he was able to guide us again at the end of that first marlin season.
Becoming that invested in someone’s life—actually caring about them, trying to support them— made this film profoundly meaningful to me. This wasn’t some random fishing captain. This was a friend.
One of the hardest parts for Danny was that doctors told him he wouldn’t be able to have children. For someone who had been abandoned as a child, that news cut deeply. He wanted to break that generational story—he wanted to be the father he never had. It was heartbreaking, and he fell into a significant depression.
I’ll never forget the day he called to tell me that his wife, Yarit, was pregnant. There were tears of joy on both ends of the phone. I can’t put into words how incredible that family is. Danny is humble, hardworking, genuine—just a good man. My life is better for knowing him.
More than anything, I hope this film honors his story the way it deserves to be told.
Flylords: The thrust of the film is about Danny letting fly fishing save him from himself. Why did the human aspect of his story attract you so much?
Wiswell: You have to keep in mind that before George and Rudy—Los Locos—arrived in Magdalena Bay, most local fishermen had never even seen a fly fisherman. They’d never seen a fly, never cast one, never watched someone catch a fish with one. They were familiar with long-range trollers coming up from Cabo San Lucas, but the vast majority of fishermen in San Carlos are sardine fishermen, clam harvesters, or hand-line fishermen inside the bay. Nets, traps, and hand lines—those were the tools they knew. Fly fishing was from another universe.
They certainly had the boat-handling skills, but understanding how to approach a bait ball, position a client, read the birds, or set up a sight-cast for marlin was completely new territory. I’ve fished billfish in many parts of the world, and almost everywhere it revolves around bait and switch: trolling hookless teasers, raising a fish into the spread, pulling the teaser away, and then casting a fly at the lit-up billfish. But George and Rudy pioneered something different in Magdalena Bay. Instead of trolling, they focused entirely on bait balls—finding them, reading them, and sight-casting to whatever predators were underneath.
A typical day starts in a panga, out in the middle of the open Pacific, scanning for birds— specifically frigate birds. If the frigates are riding high, the bait hasn’t pushed to the surface yet. But when they’re down tight on the water, something has forced the sardines up, and that’s your signal to run. Once the panga reaches a bait ball, the goal is simple: cast the fly right into the middle of the sardines and strip it back out.
You see this clearly in the film—there’s safety in numbers inside a bait ball. But the moment a sardine becomes disoriented or strays from the group, that’s when everything attacks. Wahoo, tuna, marlin, dorado—every predator is looking for the injured or the wanderer. George and Rudy treat 300-pound striped marlin like trout. The entire experience is visual, immediate, and electric—so much more engaging for fly anglers than trolling for hours hoping for a shot.
Finding bait balls is everything. The Pacific can be a blue desert, and you can run for hours without seeing life. But if you find the bait, you’ll find the marlin. That entire approach—bird reading, bait ball hunting, sight-casting—was completely foreign to commercial fishermen in San Carlos.
And that’s why what Los Locos is doing matters so much. George and Rudy have made it their mission to train local fishermen to become fly-fishing captains and guides. Commercial fishing is brutally difficult in Baja; margins are thin, gear is expensive, and the work is unforgiving. But fly guiding is different. It offers a stable, dignified, sustainable way to support a family.
Los Locos has created a real opportunity in San Carlos. It’s mutually beneficial—anglers get world-class fly fishing, and local fishermen gain a new livelihood built on skill, conservation, and pride.
Flylords: This is your fifth film in F3T over the years. How much has changed in your approach to filmmaking?
Wiswell: It’s hard to believe this is our fifth film in the Fly Fishing Film Tour. Our first project, Equilibrium: The Last Frontier, focused on the Pebble Mine and screened in 2008. That feels like a lifetime ago. Since then, we’ve made all kinds of different films, but with this project, I really wanted to focus on the story. The action can take care of itself, but what separates a good film from a meaningful one is the story behind it.
After Atlanticus premiered in 2018, I didn’t want to just jump into another random project. I wanted something that actually mattered—something I could tell from a true narrative standpoint. Danny’s story gave me that, and I felt a deep responsibility to do it justice. I’m not sure “duty” is the exact word, but I wanted to honor his life in a way that felt earned and respectful.
This film required a lot of personal growth for me because I’m not naturally a storyteller in the literary sense. I spent hundreds of hours studying story structure, watching authors break down narrative arcs and the hero’s journey, trying to figure out how to build something viewers could emotionally connect with. As an independent filmmaker, you wear every hat—cinematographer, editor, screenwriter—and every stage of this project challenged me in new ways.
I’m incredibly grateful for the people who’ve been with us for years. Nathan DeVore, our director of music, and Matt Orton, our creative director, are trusted partners and true confidants in this process. Having people like that in your corner makes all the difference.
One thing I enjoyed about this film was the shift in gear. I love working with cutting-edge equipment, but this time I actually stepped back and used more vintage-style camera gear. The story felt nostalgic, and razor-sharp, hyper-clinical imaging didn’t fit the emotional tone I wanted. The softer, more textured look seemed right for Danny’s world.
Music is another critical piece. I believe it’s one of the most important elements in any film. For this project, I wanted a blend of big, epic sound and moments that dropped into something more mariachi or ranchero—something true to the culture of a commercial fisherman in Baja. The whole film is a balance between two worlds: the new, adrenaline-filled fly-fishing scene and the old-world, sleepy Mexican fishing village where it all happens. Those worlds collide in Magdalena Bay, and I wanted to reflect that visually and emotionally.
If there’s one thing that’s changed in my filmmaking over the years, it’s that early on, I didn’t focus on story as much. With this film, I worked hard to make the story the priority rather than an afterthought. It hasn’t been easy. There have been a lot of revisions, a lot of lessons, and more than a few humbling moments. But I just hope people are as touched by Danny’s story as I have been.