Tale of the Tape – The 12 Days of Sailfish

We’ve now gone to Casa Vieja Lodge in February for four straight years, and we’ve loved every minute of it. Those of you who are considering a trip might be wondering if the tales of double-digit catches are true. Or what about the 50 sailfish days? We’ve experienced the former, but not the latter (yet).

Fortunately, the captains and the lodge keep very detailed records of each boat’s raises, bites and releases. Accordingly, we have accurate numbers for our dozen days on the water, as seen below.

That’s just a total of 12 days, on two boats, with two captains. It’s hardly representative of the overall picture. Sometimes we were doing the bait and switch and other times the mates took care of it. What should matter is the fact that we keep going back – it’s not just the fishing but the service and the ambience and the people. Next year, due to scheduling conflicts, we’re going in the fall instead of February. If you’d like to join us, or go on your own, email Hanna and she’ll give you the details.

In the meantime, I’m sitting here stewing that it’ll be so long until we go back. You see, after our first trip, we were averaging over 12 sailfish releases a day. By the conclusion of the second trip, we’d increased that mark to over 13. We struggled a bit in 2022, but still kept our rolling average at over 11 per day. Unfortunately, now it’s dropped to 9.4. That would be beyond exceptional anywhere else. We need 37 sailfish on our next three day jaunt to get back into double digits. At Casa Vieja, that’s possible. In fact, it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if we did it in a single day. That’s a big part of the reason that we keep returning.