Fishing Report - Rio Hatiguanico Cuba
On January 2nd my Father in law and I took a day away from the family vacation in Varadero to do a little tarpon fishing on the Rio Hatiguanico. Not a good fishing day but it was an interesting experience.
We originally tried booking our trip through our Westjet Vacations rep that handles other excursions packages and whatnot. While they've done this in the past on Jan 1 a new company has taken over management of the guides and such that work in the Zapatas park and Las Salinas so they had to cancel our payment and just handle transport down there for us. Not a big deal but a whole lot of messing around would have been saved if I'd just handled arrangements myself.
On the day the private taxi picked us up at 5:00 and we had about a 2 hour drive to get to the park and the boat launch. We didn't see much as it was dark but the area was mostly agricultural, ranches and sugar cane. It was neat to see on the way back but I have to say it did a lot to redefine my understanding of the word poor. It was stunning.
Once we got to the river and got sorted out with guides, everything in the boat and on our way I was pretty excited. The river where you launch is pretty narrow and freshwater. You go down about 7k in the boat to the point that the tide mixes the river to brackish water and the vegetation gives way to exclusively to mangroves. It's wider here, about bow river around Cochranne big but calm like glass. There was basically no wind and the temp was right around 30C.
It pretty quickly became apparent that we'd made a mistake in setting up for this with my FIL and I sharing a boat. He was spin fishing from the back and I was in the front fly casting. We could see tarpon rolling on the surface pretty regularly but they were on the sunny side, river right. This put me either casting over my off shoulder or turning and making my presentation on the back cast most of the time. Not something I have a lot of practice with and made worse by what I was casting.
I brought a fast 10wt with a floating line and a couple 10 foot chunks of T-14 for sink tips. As we were fishing water about ten feet deep the guide felt something along the lines of a 400 grain sink tip would be more appropriate. Luckily he had a reel with a 24ft sink line on it he let me use. Casting a 10wt with a 400gr sink is a bugger, doing it over your off shoulder with a heavily weighted fly is just awful. It was a very frustrating day, I definitely could have used a 12wt.
We did see a bunch of tarpon and I had one real solid hook up that I screwed up by lifting the rod tip too soon. These fish are BIG! It took about 2 seconds for that one to snap the fly line about a foot up from the tip. My FIL tried everything he had plus a couple of big buck tail jigs given to him by the head guide without a sniff. Our guide tried for a while too with my rod without any luck as well. There were 2 other boats on the river. One guy was alone fly casting and he boated a couple mid size tarpon, the other had 3 guys spin fishing and they got shut out as well.
For flies the guide favoured anything I had tied on a 1/0 Gamamatsu Octopus with some weight. Most effective seemed to be simple, big barbell eyes tied half way back on the shank and a half dozen cape feathers making up a fly about six inches long. Most of what I bought at Fish Tales before going he dismissed as having too light a hook.
Cost was pretty high for a day. $240 Cuban convertible pesos (equivalent to USD) each for me and my FIL and $150 cuc for our transportation. That works out to just about 1000 CAD with the current exchange rate. Expensive for a day trip and maybe worth it in a better season for fishing like March-April but I wouldn't go again this time of year.
|
Linear Mode
