WEEKLY FISHING REPORT HERE My 21' Seacat "Angel" is my pride and joy. Nothing beats a cat for smooth ride, stability, and room. They close the harbors here before it ever gets too rough for Angel. A friend here was stunned on a 40 mile trip down coast that I was calmly drinking a cup of coffee while running at 25 mph, and promptly went out and bought a cat of his own. Angel is powered by twin Honda 90hp four strokes, and equipped with outriggers, GPS, and depth finder. I've customized it for solo fishing, and have three solo marlin releases in it. The huge squared off front deck is great for casting from too. Fishing in Huatulco While most Huatulco websites will sing the praises of the wonderful deep sea fishing - without having the least bit of experience of it themselves - the truth of the matter is that Huatulco fishing is fickle. By most accounts it was less so a few years ago, but for unknown reasons it has gotten a lot more difficult lately. Marlin used to be in absolute abundance, but seemingly much less so now. Striped marlin in the winter have proved as plentiful as anything, but still pretty much a crapshoot as to the chances of a hookup. The prime black and blue marlin season of the summer has been tremendously disappointing compared to the past. While I was initially led to believe between January and March the yellowfin tuna are supposed to show up in droves, what I've come to learn is the big tuna tend to migrate first in December and January, so far offshore we rarely see any. The school tuna, 10-20 lbs, show up more in March and April. In 2011 they stayed around sporadically clear thru the summer, along with enormous schools of skipjack. There is almost no evidence here of the behemoths you find with regularity off Puerto Vallarta, the 200+ lb monsters, though there have been reports from longliners of seeing huge ones 50-70 miles offshore in December. Sailfish and dorado are staples year round, though dorado can be really erratic. A remarkable aspect about Huatulco is how quickly the water drops off to deep blue outside the bays, so you scarcely need to go any distance to hook into a lot of pelagic fish. Tuna and marlin both come within a couple miles of the coast at times, and dorado swim into the bays. But the offshore fishing seems to depend on a wide variety of factors how far you have to run at any given time. While the depths and deepwater canyons are there a few miles out, the fish aren't necessarily. Sometimes it takes a 25-30 mile run offshore to get into the fish. While most fisherman in Huatulco think of that as too long a trip, in other parts of Mexico that's only halfway to the fishing grounds. Of course sometimes all the action is 2-3 miles out. Due to the circulating currents and eddies of the Gulf of Tehuantepec, you just never know day to day. There isn't a great deal of good inshore fishing around the Bays of Huatulco because the bays between Santa Cruz and San Agustin are off limits due to being coral areas and protected waters of the Huatulco National Park. In the other direction (Chahue, Tangolunda, Conejos) there doesn't seem to be much action in the bays until you reach the outflow of the Copalita River. Starting there and running further down the coast, the nearshore fishing seems better, with snook, roosterfish, jacks, and snapper. The offshore fishing can also be great down this way, and sees far less pressure than closer to town does. The same is true of the inshore fishing between San Agustin and Puerto Angel. The depth drop off in this zone is quick, as you're in 80 feet of water scarcely a hundred yards from a sandy beach in places. Up around Puerto Angel, the water drops off from 400' to deep blue starting not much more than a half mile from the cliffs. The best tuna fishing in winter can often be within a mile from shore there. Wintertime in Huatulco, when most gringo visitors come, is unfortunately not one of the best times of year for fishing. Cold water upwellings and nutrient blooms can make it very hit or miss, and conditions shift dramatically from day to day. The water will be green and cloudy and 72 degrees one day and the next day warm blue 80 degree water will sweep in, only to be gone again the next. As long as the water isn't too cold, though, marlin still get drawn in to feed on the plentiful schools of barrilete. Most everything tends to hinge on the yellowfin tuna run, though, as far as whether any kind of good fishing can be guaranteed or not. If the tuna aren't in, there can be many long days of trolling that produce a whole lot of nothing. Even when the tuna are running, yellowfin can be notoriously frustrating. They move very quickly and spend most of their time below the surface at 50-80', so finding them and staying with them isn't easy. Some days when they're crashing the surface in huge numbers they can be easy to catch on anything you put out there, and other days I've seen them refuse to touch almost anything. I've abandoned deep diving plugs because they limit your speed and mobility. With a lot more experience under my belt now with some good offseason yellowfin and skipjack fishing, I've found aside from a small aluminum cedar plug, the absolute go-to lure for school tuna is a little four inch jet. You bring up tuna you had no idea were even there. Most of the local captains take the same cookie-cutter approach of trolling for tuna, billfish, and mahi-mahi, because that's what tourists want. While initially I believed it would be an almost untapped zone for deep dropping for grouper and the like, thinking the underwater structure would resemble the jagged topography of the land, my depth recorder has shown otherwise. The bottom between 200' to 600' is stunningly flat and mostly sand from San Agustin to well past the Copalita. I have found a few mini-walls and ledges in 400', but that's it. There are a number of canyon slopes that drop off quickly from 400' to much deeper and ridges further offshore, but most of them seem to be sand bottom. Closer to shore in 60' to 160', there are more jigging possibilities, but mostly small sea bass and triggerfish is all you get. Jigging spoons seem to be the best way to go, because there are a number of toothy reef fish that destroy any kind of plastic tails on bullet head jigs. Most of the structure is a stone's throw away from the cliffs and headlands and islands, and as soon as you get away from them the bottom turns to sand. The local commercial fleet seems to have heavily fished out the snapper in the area, and while bigger ones are still to be had here and there on live bait at night, they're a shadow of what they were 10-15 years ago. I've had zero success around Huatulco fishing with lures for snapper, but a lot more luck farther afield up and down the coast. Barrilete are almost always around in schools somewhere to be found. Commonly called bonito (though they are not a true bonito) in other parts of the world, barrilete are a small, fierce fighting member of the tuna family. There are mixed impressions of this fish and most gringos disdain it because of their preference for white meat fish, and even some of the locals don't eat it. Furthermore the whole bonito/barrilete issue is just as confusing in Pacific Mexico as it is in the Atlantic. In the southeastern US, there is a similar fish commonly called bonito (or "bonehead" derogatorily), euthynnus alletteratus, that is the Atlantic equivalent of barrilete, yet is virtually inedible. The bonehead is not a true bonito either, though throughout the southeastern US it is the only fish people know as bonito. It is completely different than the true Atlantic bonito, sarda sarda, which is a less common northern fish. The Oaxacans at least differentiate barrilete from true Mexican bonito, sarda orientalis, whivh they call "chula". So if you know your barrilete (red meat tuna family) and you know your chula (light meat mackerel family) you don't have to get into the confusion around the misuse of the name bonito. Barrilete are a hundred times more plentiful and travel in large schools versus the more solitary chula, so you're also vastly more likely to catch barrilete than chula. For pure sport, there is almost no better fighting fish pound for pound than the barrilete. They are absolute brutes. I thought I never would have cause to use the phrase "barrilete on steroids", but then skipjack tuna started showing up here. THERE is a brute beyond belief, one of the toughest 6-8 lb fish you will ever fight on light tackle. If it wasn't confusing enough to the novice of barrilete vs chula, then you have the similar looking skipjack tuna which is easily distinguished by stripes on the belly rather than the back. And the skipjack (aku) is an excellent eating tuna, redder than yellowfin (ahi), but fantastic as sashimi or seviche. They're also thriving in huge numbers, and greatly encouraged as a food choice compared to overfished yellowfin and bluefin. For another hopeless bit of confusion in Oaxaca, though, the locals call them bluefin tuna- "atun aleta azul" or just "atun azul" - because they're not familiar with them and have never seen a real bluefin tuna. The correct name in Spanish is "atun listado" or simply the Japanese name, aku, but you draw a blank look from locals if you use these names. The photo above on the left shows how easily confused barrilete (left) and chula (right) are to the untrained eye. There are some clear giveaways, such as the nasty mackerel teeth of the bonito/chula and the lack of spots below the pectoral fin. Additionally, the stripes on the back run farther forward on the chula, plus it has more of an elongated mackerel shape than the football-shaped tuna look of the barrilete. The skipjack in the photo on the right is always given away immediately by the belly stripes and lack of stripes on the back. The official stance by local authorities (the Navy) on the National Park Marine Zone that extends from Bahia Violin to San Agustin and two miles out is that it's off limits to fishing. There is nothing in the National Park Management Plan for Huatulco which confirms this, but I'm not going to argue with a gunboat. I'm perfectly happy to leave the area as a "no fishing" zone because I believe strongly in marine preserves, though unfortunately many of the locals exempt themselves from the ban. For that matter, longlining was supposedly banned in Mexican waters 30 years ago, but the locals clutter up the ocean with miles of poorly marked longlines that are a navigational hazard and general nuisance, but apparently because they run hundreds of hooks rather than the many thousands that larger commercial longliners do, they are not considered longlines. Technically anyone fishing in Mexico is supposed to have a fishing license, but I've found in practice it's usually only applied to the owner of a boat, not to his guests. Some of the noteworthy rules are as follows - an aggregate limit of 10 fish per angler, no more than five of any one species per angler, only one billfish allowed and it counts as five toward the aggregate limit, and only two each of dorado or roosterfish per angler, each fish counting as five toward the aggregate limit. Few are aware of the rules or pay them any attention, gringos or locals, but if we are going to maintain a good fishery here, please enforce them on yourself and practice catch and release on anything you're not going to eat. Way too many people keep billfish in Huatulco, and it's not helping the already depleted fishery. Many of the practices in Huatulco would be scorned in serious fishing destinations, because they make a joke of the idea of sportfishing. The more knowledgeable local mates and captains with experience of sportfishing outside of Huatulco will practice catch and release, but most won't unless you firmly insist to them you only believe in "agarrar y soltar" of billfish.