WEEKLY FISHING REPORT HERE My 21' Seacat "Angel" is my pride and joy, and the only sportfishing cat in Huatulco. The ride, stability, and room in it are nothing short of amazing for a 21' boat, and the twin Honda 90hp four strokes are great quiet, smoke-free power. They close the harbors here before it ever gets too rough for my cat. Fishing in Huatulco The most dependable action to be found in Huatulco is between January and March, when the yellowfin tuna show up in droves. The school tuna provide nonstop excitement, whereas the big boys can prove trickier to hook into. Sailfish and mahi-mahi (dorado) and marlin are year round, though the marlin fishing is lights out in July and August. 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, and sometimes when the tuna aren't following the coast past Puerto Angel you have to run 20-30 miles out to the Middle America Trench (some 15,000' deep) to catch them. Marlin are similarly unpredictable as to where you'll find them. When there are well-defined water color change lines and current lines, the dorado are a can't-miss proposition. In the absence of a line to work, dorado can prove very elusive. 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 often stay well below the surface, so finding them and staying with them isn't easy. The most dependable way is to search for large pods of spinner dolphin. If they come to play with your boat like they usually do, they're probably not on tuna. But if they ignore you and appear to be moving and diving with purpose, likely there are tuna underneath that you can read on a fishfinder. Now getting them to hit something? That's a whole 'nother game. Sometimes they'll be hitting surface lures like cedar plugs or tuna feathers, and other times you can't get them to the surface. If they're in enough abundance, you can stop and jig for them, but smaller schools move so fast that by the time you get your jig down, your fishfinder has gone blank again. Downriggers, which otherwise seem to be fairly useless in Huatulco, can be really handy in such conditions, because yellowfin are often traveling between 50 to 100 feet below the surface. Any kind of big Rapala Magnum that dives 30 to 40 feet is the next best thing. The only downside to the Magnum's is they limit how fast you can troll and it can be hard to keep up with erratic and fast moving schools of yellowfin. But no one ever said yellowfin were easy. The small school tuna offer surprisingly little fight on rods of more than a 30 lb class, and light spinning rods with 30 lb braid are the best way to make them a really fun fight. There's also something to be said for spinning rods as far as allowing a more flexible approach. You can cast and let your jigs sink while darting the boat around to stay on fish. The only problem is when you get a 50 lb or bigger yellowfin on that burns off your spool before you know it. When you get one of those home and get it on the grill, though, you're reminded it was all worth it. 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, but most of them seem to be sand bottom. Closer to shore in 60' to 160', there are a lot more jigging possibilities for everything from snapper to snook to grouper to giant needlefish. Jigging spoons, butterfly jigs, and diamond jigs seem to be the best way to go, because there are a number of toothy reef fish that seem to 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 pretty much fished out the snapper in the area, and while they're still to be had here and there, they're a shadow of what they were 10-15 years ago. When locals have talked about GOOD snapper fishing to me, they've talked about places 35 miles down the coast. Just past San Agustin there seems to be a lot more rock or reef structure extending a half mile offshore to 200' of water, but for me there has been little evidence of good fishing on it yet. Barrilete are almost always around in schools somewhere to be found. Commonly called bonito (though they are not a true bonito) and also known as black skipjack, barrilete is a small, fierce fighting member of the tuna family with potentially tasty dark red meat that is great marinated in soy sauce and ginger and seared on the grill... IF prepared right. There are very mixed impressions of this fish and most gringos disdain it because of their preference for white meat fish, and even many 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 Florida, 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, it is more accurately called a little tunny, also false albacore, 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 prized for its food value. The Mexicans at least differentiate barrilete from true Mexican bonito, sarda orientalis, which they call by the name "chula". So if you know your barrilete (red meat tuna family) and you know your chula (light meat mackerel family) there's less confusion about what's a bonito or not. I tried explaining the misconception to another gringo fisherman recently and he had no idea what a true bonito was. Most people don't. He insisted, no, barrilete were bonito and what I was calling bonito were chula. Now barrilete, euthynnus lineatus, is a surprisingly edible fish unlike its Atlantic counterpart, but often is regarded as only being useful for bait. Sear it just right, however, and it can be a delicious, tender delight that tastes more like really good steak than fish. But you HAVE to be careful to remove all the near black bloody meat in the center while filet-ing it (just like with yellowfin or any tuna) and only save the best quality dark red meat. Whereas the blood soaked center meat is easy to distinguish from the good meat on a yellowfin, it is harder on a barrilete because all the meat is so dark. Even still, every 3 or 4 times I have it pretty good, I have a really mediocre one that turns me off it for a bit. As far as chula/Mexican bonito go, you can use your favorite fish recipes for mahi, bluefish, or mackerel and it will be good. (Olive oil, oregano, salt, pepper, and herbes de provence you can't go wrong with on the grill.) The meat is nothing like barrilete, a wonderful light flesh. Fry up nice thick chunks of it and it can be amazing. There is a woeful amount of ignorance regarding the respective qualities of the two, and mexfish.com misguidedly characterizes chula like barrilete as something the locals just use for bait. The photo above shows how easily confused they 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. But at first glance you can understand why people in both the Atlantic and Pacific routinely throw away an incredibly good fish because they think it's a "bonehead". The official stance 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. I can find nothing in the National Park Management Plan for Huatulco which confirms this, but I'm not going to argue with the local authorities. This PDF document - Huatulco National Park study - lays out the exact boundaries and rules, which say that both recreational and even commercial fishing are permitted. I'm perfectly happy to leave the area as a "no fishing" zone, though the locals only pay it so much attention. Below is a chart of the boundaries. No one around here has bothered to learn the exact GPS numbers or question the accuracy of the information given them, so I've heard varying distances you have to stay offshore ranging from 3-5 miles out, when in fact it's no more than 2 miles. Technically anyone fishing in Mexico is supposed to have a fishing license, but I've found it's 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 which also count 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. (The dorado limits are the ones most flagrantly broken, and actually make very little sense because dorado reproduce and grow so fast they aren't in need of that much protection. Mexican officials placed restrictions on them simply because they are one of the most popular sportfish for tourists.)