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Even Central America has not escaped the recent cold snap. The fishing in Guatemala has not been significantly affected although cooler water has been pushing in closer to shore. See our latest temperature fishing charts here.

December started with huge amounts of bait concentrating in blue water starting at about 20 miles from the dock. In order to get to the productive fishing, the boats first ran through unusually green water followed by almost 2 miles of algae that had caused the water to turn brown and almost brackish looking. Once we traversed this and found better water, there was activity everywhere. Usually when there is bait in the water it is normally accompanied by birds circling overhead looking for the scraps that the predators below have left behind. In this case however, there was so much bait and it was so concentrated in huge bait balls that the flocks of birds had become lazy and rather flying in search of a meal instead just floated lazily on top of the bait and waited for the scraps to float to the surface.
So much easy pickings for the billfish made for difficult and challenging conditions for the sportfishing boats that were circling in the area. Our captains spend most of the day fishing the perimeter of all of this activity trying to tempt any marauding sailfish that had yet to find a bait ball to focus on. They succeeded in a steady bite throughout the day, but not achieving results that we would hope for with so many fish in the area.

It was not until later in the afternoon when the baitfish had finally escaped the death grip of the voracious billfish that the action really picked up. It seems like in spite of the feast that had been presented to the sailfish all day, once the bait balls had become scattered the billfish became even more aggressive and ready to attack any appearance of surface activity. Almost as soon as the baitfish scattered and the birds disappeared along with them, the sailfish started on what became a voracious bite with most of the remaining boats hooking up to singles, doubles and triples immediately.

What had started out as a frustrating days fishing have been saved by the last hour or so of competition standard fishing in Guatemala.

We still have one space left for our shared fishing trip to Guatemala in late March 2011, if you think you may be interested, please call us ASAP to reserve your space.