Casa Vieja Lodge, A Family Affair

The primary reason that we went to Casa Vieja Lodge in the first place, back at the beginning of 2020, was because of my parents. They’d offered to take us on a trip to celebrate my 50th birthday. While they’ve traveled far more than I have, they’ve come to expect certain creature comforts. They’re also not particularly outdoorsy, but they said a fishing trip would be fine, as long as it met their unspecified-but-certainly-lofty standards. No “fish camp” was gonna do.

After a fairly extensive search process, Casa Vieja was a clear winner. Everything from the Mercedes Sprinter vans to the high end linens to the food to the air-conditioned salons on the boat was above the floor of their expectations. As far as I was concerned, all it took was the promise of exceptional sailfishing.

While I don’t know that they’d go back, nearly five years later my parents are still talking about that trip. Maybe that’s what convinced my non-angling brother that it was time to go. Well, “non-angling” might not be exactly accurate. He and his best friend The Vul (long story) joined us for a trip to El Salto in 2016, and I guess he wets a line every five to ten years on average. Still, he and his bunch of business school friends take a trip every year. Usually it’s climbing a mountain somewhere or something else that tests their individual and collective mettle, although I also believe they’ve gone on pure eating/drinking junkets in the past. This year, with a little bit of prodding, they elected to join us in Guatemala.

While the 147 combined sailfish across our two boats over three days was beyond impressive, what I really enjoyed about the trip was that Hanna and I and my brother Mike traveled together and arrived a day earlier than everyone else. I actually got to spend time with him, without distractions. We’re both busy enough that we rarely get that opportunity. It made my trip substantially better. After that, however, he and his boys were low maintenance. They fished, they ate, they drank, they played cards, they repeated the process. I could leave them to their own devices.

I’m not quite sure precisely what I’m getting at here except to say that Casa Vieja is a “set it and forget it” experience. It doesn’t matter if the person is fish-obsessed like me, or a first-timer, or someone who just wants a perfect boat ride in gorgeous scenery. I can recommend this trip to them. It’s the one place that I’d take just about any family member and not worry about whether they’ll have a good time. Trust me, they will. You’d have to try to have a bad time there.

I just wish that one of my four nieces or two nephews had an interest in going. I don’t want to waste the experience on someone who doesn’t want to be there, but I’d love to spoil them with an opportunity to try something that’s pretty close to heaven. I may be the only hard core angler in the family (except for Hanna, of course), but if you want your non-fishing family members to fall in love with the sport, you couldn’t pick a better gateway for even the pickiest among them than Casa Vieja Lodge.