THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

A stretch of land separated from the mainland by a long lagoon with very few roads across it, each of
which has a check point allowing through only official personnel, and even then for the most part on a
daily return basis.
This is a four and five star all-inclusive luxury resort, where people like hotel staff and other essential
workers are bussed in and back out
every day.
The one concession to this was a small
block house where some essential
workers were put up to stay longer
term, and though still very tightly
controlled, it was these people who
helped me with the shore fishing.
They still kept everything to eat, but
with numbers of fish taken so small
scale compared to the geographical
area in question, it didn't seems to
make much difference to population
numbers. Nor to fish sizes either. And
while I'm certain that with a bit of
exploration there would be many great
John Adams, Red Snapper
fishing marks along the connecting
causeway and around the fringes of the
exclusion zone, there was one spot in particular which I fished regularly.
With hindsight, I wish I'd chosen to stay at Cayo Guillermo. The hotels at both resorts are exactly the
same, in most cases run by the same chains. Where I lost out was proximity to the fishing, the best of
which was from the road bridge across the inlet close to where the hotels are situated at Cayo Guillermo.
Each morning I would have to catch a bus, which then stopped at every hotel en route through to the
turning round point beyond the Cayo Guillermo hotel area, which took around forty minutes. The draw
back was that this service ended around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, which meant that if I wasn't on the
last bus back, I was stranded.
Thankfully, knowing I was there to fish and would be going back, the driver looked out for me and
would wait. In fact, on one occasion, the ticket collector even came looking for me. But it was still very
restrictive. I couldn't fish in the evenings, which people staying at the adjacent hotels could, and from
what they told me, that made a very big difference.
Close by was also one of the block houses where a few of the locals were billeted, and with nothing
else to do while off-shift, they would too fish from the bridge.
Most used hand-lines, because while I was there, tackle of any sort was virtually impossible to come
by. The nearest tackle shop I could find was in Havana which was quite a reasonable flight time away.
Maybe the new accord with Barrack Obama will now help make a difference. It needs to.
A couple of the locals had rods and reels given to them at the end of holidays by anglers they'd helped.
Otherwise it was a coke tin with pebbles inside it sat on a hand line as a bite indicator. Yet still they
caught some amazing fish.
The main target species was red snapper, the best of which I saw caught topped fifteen pounds. Not the
most numerous fish however. That would have been jacks.
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