Captain David Salazar: Casa Vieja’s Sails Leader

When we visited Casa Vieja Lodge in 2020, owner David Salazar was in the US at the Miami Boat Show, but on our recent return visit not only did we meet him, but we had the good fortune to fish with him two of our three days on the water. He normally runs the Poco Loco, which at 44 feet has up until recently been the king of the fleet, but we were able to join him on The Hooker, a boat he’d acquired just a few weeks earlier. It’s a 48-footer, and in billfish circles it’s well-known for its trips around the world and 87 IGFA World Records.

While Salazar’s fishing skills can’t be questioned, what really amazed me was his passion for the sport. He’s seen thousands of billfish come to the boat, and yet he was every bit as excited for each additional one as we were. Just as importantly, he’s an exceptional teacher, and coached us through the bait-and-switch with remarkable patience. “This is your trip,” he kept telling us. “I want you to be happy.” It was clear that he meant it. 

He and his mate Johnny joined us for dinner on our final night in Guatemala and Hanna and I could not let that opportunity go to waste. We quizzed him on his history and his plans. Here they are, in his own words: 

HPFC: What is your fishing origin story?

Salazar: I was born and raised in Miami and my dad used to take me fishing when I was a kid. We had a boat growing up and we used to go fishing all of the time. He used to take me to sailfish tournaments when I was a junior – I won three of them in a row: 1980, 1981 and 1982. 

HPFC: So what’s the path from being 12 years old and accomplishing all of that to ending up in Guatemala?

Salazar: I started working as a mate down in the Keys and I got invited to go on a traveling boat to Venezuela when I was about 19 – so I ended up in Venezuela for a couple of years, going back and forth in the seasons. Then my parents helped me buy the charter boat that I initially brought down here, and I bought that boat from a guy down in Islamorada and I started the business and I had been in business maybe six months and I had already known the original guy, Tim Choate, who had the original fishing lodge down here called Fins & Feathers. He had started in Costa Rica and then moved the operation here. At the time I was in Islamorada, 27 years old, finger up my nose, didn’t know what was going on. He tells me, “You want to come to Guatemala? I’ll give you $1,250 a day. I’ll guarantee you 150 days a year.” I said, “Point at it on the map.” That’s how I got here. I went through the Panama Canal and drove the boat up to Guatemala and been here ever since.

HPFC: How many years have you been here?

Salazar: I got here in October of ’98.

HPFC: What has changed in Guatemala since 1998?

Salazar: The population explosion. When we got down here, you’d open the gate to the lodge and across the street all you’d see were sugar cane fields. This whole road was empty all the way to the port. We used to fish in the old days out of a river – we’d go in an inlet and the boats would park behind the lodge. That silted up. That’s why they built the marina that we’re in now. So we’ve been in that marina since about 2004. I took a hiatus. Once Fins & Feathers closed I had my own little lodge and my two boats and then I sold that to a client and realized I messed up. I was like, “What am I going to do now?” So it was like three or four years away from Guatemala and then I helped start up this one and ended up buying it.

HPFC: Why should someone like us – a bass fisherman, or even a non-angler – choose Guatemala as their first billfishing excursion?

Salazar: I’d say the amount of bites we get. On average we get a lot of bites.

HPFC: What about someone who has been chasing billfish for 25 years? Why do they need to come back to Guatemala?

Salazar: They all love it. It’s the bites. See that guy over there? He had a charter boat here. He’s been fishing with me now 20 years. He sold the charter boat and he ended up staying at the lodge and bringing groups down.

HPFC: How many days a year are you on the water?

Salazar: One hundred and fifty, maybe one sixty.

HPFC: Do you ever get tired of it?

Salazar: Nope. I’m going to do it anyways, might as well get paid for it.

HPFC: What is a great day on the water to you?

Salazar: Watching you guys catch your own fish. That to me is the best, honestly. That’s what it’s all about, watching you learning and doing it yourselves. Anybody can hand you a rod. There’s clients that get on the boat and they want us to hook everything. They don’t want to do it, but you guys – the whole idea was learning how to do it. Now you can go to Costa Rica and get on another boat and you kind of know how to do it.

HPFC: Where else have you fished besides Guatemala, in Central America or elsewhere?

Salazar: All the Bahamas, Venezuela, the Caribbean. Went to Australia four seasons in a row. Hawaii.

HPFC: So what is still on your bucket list?

Salazar: The Amazon. Believe it or not, the Amazon.

HPFC: But you deal with giant fish every day – why does that intrigue you?

Salazar: I want to catch peacock bass on a fly. Tigerfish – I want to go to Africa and catch tigerfish.

HPFC: Does it ever feel like a job to you?

Salazar: You get tired and worn out because of the sun but it’s still a blast.

HPFC: If billfish didn’t exist, what would you be fishing for?

Salazar: I probably would have been a backcountry guide – permit, bonefish. That’s what I really wanted to be. When we had our house in the Keys I was always in the backcountry, Everglades National Park, Flamingo, always bonefishing. Then my mom remarried and he introduced me to a guy named John Phillips. I was about 14 or 15 years old, and JP used to take me to Australia. He was the billfisherman. I’d already fished sailfish when I was a kid, but I really liked the backcountry and he’s the one that got me on the boat going to Venezuela, got me on the boat going to the Caribbean. That opened a whole different world to me. Bonefish are bait!

HPFC: If fishing didn’t exist, what would you be doing?

Salazar: Probably flipping hamburgers.

HPFC: For the non-angler, the corporate group, why is this the perfect vacation?

Salazar: It’s all-inclusive. You don’t have to worry about it. How many places are there that you can call, say “Here’s my credit card,” and from soup to nuts it’s taken care of, except your airfare.

HPFC: Both of our trips to Casa Vieja have been during February. For the novice or the advanced guy, what are the advantages and disadvantages of different times of the year?

Salazar: Generally, in the last three to four years, our January and February have been a little slower, but this year our January was spectacular. December, January, February and March are usually the snowbirds getting out of the snow. The fishing’s still very good. But that spring bite – April, May, June – you get a lot of big mahis. It’s the spring. Everywhere on the planet spring is awesome. Here you get more blue marlin bites.

HPFC: Does your wife like to fish?

Salazar: She does now. She didn’t like it in the beginning.

HPFC: How did you meet her if you were always on the water?

Salazar: If our offseason, we had nothing to do so I always went back home. Generally from about June through September I’d either get on another boat and go to Venezuela or I’d go home to Miami. She was born and raised in Hawaii but went to UM for college and I happened to meet her through a friend. Went to a party, there she was, and 16 years later – three and a half kids.

HPFC: What are your goals for Casa Vieja?

Salazar: We are working on expanding the lodge and expanding the brand and then all of this happened. But I’m still going to do it on my own, so that’s why we bought The Hooker, to expand into Costa Rica trips. It’s blue marlin FAD fishing, the Super Bowl of fishing. And I also took one of the Contenders home. A buddy of mine has a fishing operation out of Key West. I’m going to buy into his operation and expand that one. Something home-grown.

HPFC: You mentioned the Costa Rica trips. What are you planning to do there?

Salazar: The FAD (fish aggregating device) trips, for the guy that’s from the Northeast they’re used to these overnight trips. The first FADs usually start at about 70 miles and the furthest ones get out to about 150, so you’ve got to run out and you spend the night out on the ocean. Literally you’re fishing from sun-up to sun-down and the FADs are loaded with bait, which attracts all of the blue marlin. You’ll average 15, 18 or 20 bites a day and you’ll have those explosive days with 30, 40 or 50 bites. By 11 o’clock in the morning if you have 25 bites on blues it’s like whoa. I remember one day we were chugging back with one of my best friends who was working here – Chris Sheeder, who just passed away from pancreatic cancer – we were at one of the FADs and we’d drifted off it like four miles. The sun’s not even up yet. I got my coffee in my hand, we’d just put the teasers out, and I’m sitting in the cockpit and all of a sudden about a 400-pound black. The sun’s not even up and we’ve got a 400-pound black. It’s cool. It’s a whole different world.

HPFC: What makes marlin so special?

Salazar: It’s a sailfish times a hundred. It’s amazing.

HPFC: How many sailfish have you caught in your life?

Salazar: Over twenty thousand.

HPFC: Is each one a new experience?

Salazar: It is for you guys. For you guys it’s a new fish. The blue marlin thing, that’s what’s cool. You’ve got to see a blue marlin. When you’re sitting in the bridge and you look down and you see that animal, it looks like a submarine. I had a client one day who asked, “How can you tell the difference?” I pointed at the right teaser and said, “That’s a sailfish.” I pointed at the other teaser and said, “That’s a blue marlin.” At that moment, I don’t why he asked the question, but that’s what happened. We had about a 350-pound blue marlin piling on the short teaser and a sailfish piling on the other teaser. He understood. It’s like an elephant versus an aardvark.

HPFC: Do you fish for them the same way?

Salazar: You pitch bait the whole way. When we fish the FADs you’ll fish four teasers – the bridge teasers and the long teasers, but then we’ll pull something called dredges, like big umbrellas with bait. We’ll pull two dredges, short teasers and long teasers. Then, instead of pulling baits on the riggers we’ll pull two lures with hooks. Those lures are on fifties and we call those the “mop ups.” So if you miss them on the pitch bait, nine out of ten times they come around and eat those lures long. It’s like a security.

HPFC: Is there a bucket list fish for you?

Salazar: A grander. For my 50th, which was last September, I was supposed to go to Hawaii and fish 10 days around the full moon, which is the best time. My bucket list is a Pacific grander blue marlin – and an Atlantic, but that’s Madeira and that’s a whole other story.

CLICK HERE if you’d like to fish with Capt. Salazar or any of Casa Vieja’s other incredible Captains.