It's always exciting to visit a new fishing destination, but I think I enjoy return trips even more, assuming we've already established that a place was appealing enough the first time around to want to go back to. On subsequent trips, you have a baseline for what to expect that was only beginning to form during your first visit. You come back with the rod or the fly line you wished you'd had with you last time, you bring the flies that didn't have before when the guide shook his head in disapproval as you asked him to pick a winner out of your box. All the odds and ends you thought you'd need that proved unnecessary last year get to stay tucked away at home and you meander through the airport with a refreshingly light load of just the bare essentials. These are the upsides to revisiting a place multiple times.
The list of drawbacks can be equally long but dwell largely within the confines of our minds. Having never been to place before, sometimes you stumble upon the best conditions, tides, an abundance of fish, preponderance of luck and so forth on your first effort and form an unrealistic expectation about what the fishing is always like. Without a lot of data to reflect on, we're quick to assume this is just how it is and might underappreciate the degree of good fortune you met in simply showing up in the right place at the right time. Imagine an angler travels to Washington with the hopes of pursuing anadromous fish and lands on the Skagit River smack dab in the middle of an epic pink salmon run. That angler comes back a couple of years later at the same time to find a smaller return, perhaps the fish are few weeks behind their usual timing, maybe the river blows out with an atypical storm system and the angler finds themselves looking for few fish in chocolate milk colored water. Is this avoidable? Not really, when you planned the trip months to years in advance, bought plane tickets, made hotel reservations. What are you going to do? Not fish? I don't think so. Simply put, that is fishing. It's about making the most of what you have to work with.
I think about this sort of thing a lot and thought about it most recently in the context of our hosted trip to Tarpon Cay Lodge in the Yucatan this past July. We went to the same place around the same week in 2024 and experienced some pretty stellar fishing for juvenile tarpon consistently throughout the week. The week prior to our trip had seen the arrival of Hurricane Beryl to the Yucatan coastline and we felt pretty lucky we hadn't picked that week, as it ended up being canceled and rescheduled. Following the storm and a lot of rain, the tarpon we encountered seemed overly eager to wolf down just about any fly you threw their way. Despite flubbed casts, repeated trout sets and failures to "bow to the silver king" early in the week, we landed probably more fish than we deserved. Of course the food, guide staff, hotel accommodations and hospitality were unparalleled and only made the experience better.
Fast forward back to our trip last month and we found conditions to be a little different. The months leading up to our visit had been unusually dry and the wind, which largely abates in the Caribbean during the heart of summer maintained its ferocity as though it had a score to settle. We'd rise each day to relative calm and find tarpon rolling contentedly in the myriad lagoons, river mouths and open flats. We'd typically stick a few nice fish early on and then the breeze would pick up markedly and finding fish became more challenging. While wind is often the nemesis of fly anglers and the superstitious among us are loath to mention the dreaded "W", it presents its own set of unique problems in tarpon fishing.
Baby tarpon generally aren't too hard to target or catch if you can locate them. Somedays that "if" can be as vast as the expansive mangrove coastline and turtle grass flats these critters call home. Tarpon have the ability to gulp air to supplement their oxygen intake and when the water is calm, stagnant and bathwater warm, they do so regularly. When they surface to breathe, they can reveal their location from hundreds of yards away. When the wind kicks up, not only does the rippled surface of the water make spotting shallow finning tarpon harder, but all that wave action is mixing oxygen into the water so they don't need to come up and gulp air. The other challenge brought on by wind is that it makes the boat noisy. Tarpon, like most flats species are skittish and hyper-attuned to their environment. Despite our guides' steadfast efforts to be stealthy, the wind waves often slapped the hull of our panga loudly enough to keep the tarpon schools well beyond reach of our best casts.
All this being said, we had an incredible trip with quite a few tarpon brought to hand along with some really nice sized juveniles and a handful of less common bycatch species like ladyfish, snook and jack crevalle. A couple of new folks brought their first tarpon to hand and those that went last year had really honed their casting and presentation skills to bring their A-game.
One morning when the conditions were relatively calm, my buddy's son and I got to run a little further out than usual to search for schools of bigger juveniles and a handful of adults feeding around a group of cenotes, or underwater springs. We saw fish in the 60-80 lb. class and cast our 10 weights instead of the usual 8's. These fish were moving quickly much of the time and typically away from the boat as the wind intensified, but we got several shots at them. At one point, I had just stepped up to the bow for my turn and found a school of tarpon moving at 11 O’clock from left to right about 80 feet away. I made a cast that I thought fell a little short. I retrieved my big black and purple Tarpon Toad back hoping that I might get another opportunity before they moved out of range. Just before pulling the fly out of the water to recast a tarpon of around 30 lbs. sharked the Toad right at the bow, ran under the boat and tail-walked across the surface for several feet in an eruption of pure chaos. I somehow managed to lead the line around the bow and clear it of the boat, not break a rod and land the fish after slugging it out for a good 10 minutes.
Another morning after a full moon and cloudless night we found several hundred tarpon schooled up on an extra skinny flat, pushing water and roving around nervously. Our guide Cresp poled the panga slowly into range and stopped some distance from the school to avoid spooking them. He selected a sparsely tied foam-backed shrimp pattern from my box and tied it onto my boatmate Steve's leader before Steve quietly stepped up onto the bow to take a shot. The school swam in and out of range over the next several minutes and Steve would make 50' casts ahead of them and slowly strip the fly back. Every now and then a tarpon rushed the surface-skimming shrimp pattern and then turned away at the last minute. Finally, one of the bigger tarpon took chase, confidently slurped the fly and came tight. The fish tore up and down the tranquil flat with a vengeance, exploding in a series of violent, gill-rattling leaps, burrowing into the weeds and running every which way in barely a foot of water. Steve fought the 20 pound tarpon along with several additional pounds of weeds on the leader until the fish eventually began to tire and come towards the boat. Then with one final burst of energy the tarpon jumped and threw the hook. It was one of those rare times that it might have been more exciting to watch the hook up and subsequent fight transpire then to be the one playing the fish.
Late in the morning on another day I was fishing with my good friend Nathan and our guide Raphael. The wind was tearing up the flats and making it next to impossible to locate fish out there so we explored a series of creek mouths where we hoped some the tarpon would seek refuge in the shade. Now this is some of the more technical casting you can experience, with mangrove branches creeping out every which way in a channel scarcely wider than the panga you're fishing out of. In most spots, you have but a single unobstructed casting lane through which you can safely drop your fly in the shadows beneath the mangroves or the deeper "hole" where tarpon will frequently hold up. If you deviate from the lane even slightly, you blast your fly into some of the toughest vegetation on the planet and often ruin the spot when you try to go pull it free. It demands bass-master accuracy and most of the time, the perfect cast was rewarded with a big silver flash and subsequent baby tarpon going airborne in tight quarters. Not this day. I watched Nathan on the bow deliver cast after cast with pinpoint precision into the most gnarly of openings in the mangroves, progressively prospecting a few feet further back in with each attempt. Nothing. A few more casts and nothing. We could see and hear tarpon rolling 50 plus feet back in the creek but no feasible way to get to them and they seemed to know it. We'd been setting a 30 minute timer to swap positions on the bow to share equal fishing opportunity throughout the day. When the alarm went off, Nathan motioned to step down and said, "You're up Willy". "Nah," I said with a smirk, "You keep going till you get one," recognizing he was fully in the zone with his casting and being all but certain I would have only embarrassed myself up there in those tight spaces. The experience reminded me of an oft-repeated phrase I grew up hearing from my soccer and baseball coaches as a kid..."It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."
Fishing is fishing and all you can hope for is to be at your best and if you're sharing the day with a guide, that they're going above and beyond to try to put you on fish at each and every opportunity. Our guides for the week were Cresp, Martin and Raphael, two of which we fished with last year. The guides at Tarpon Cay Lodge have been at it for a long time, know their fishery intimately and are incredibly friendly and personable. I especially enjoyed a day one on one with fishing Martin. We fished hard and spoke in Spanish most of the time and he not only bestowed some much appreciated knowledge around tarpon behavior and fishing tactics on me, but also improved my Spanish vocabulary. All of the guides' English is far better than my Spanish but I what better opportunity to practice.
When the fishing is tough, all the other elements of a travel trip take on more weight. The hospitality, the conversations, the food, the service and the accommodations are as consistently awesome as one could hope for. We stayed at the Yuum Ha in Rio Lagartos again. The meals were exceptional and the staff was equally incredible at anticipating our needs. We typically fished split days to take advantage of the best fishing conditions, going out in the morning from 5:30-10:30 and again in the afternoon from 3:30-6:30. Many of the productive tarpon locales are pretty close to Rio Lagartos and neighboring town of San Felipe, meaning we spent a lot more time fishing than running in the boat. One of the things I enjoy most about this program is that it's relaxing. You have time to take a mid-day siesta after lunch in a refreshing air conditioned room or walk to see the saltwater crocodiles in the biological preserve down the road. I come back from a lot of trips feeling like I need a vacation from the vacation, but not this one. Travel is easy with a direct flight to Cancun and short 3 hour van ride over to Rio Lagartos. Each night the sun dips below the Caribbean, illuminating the horizon in a wild palate of rosy orange while the many flamingoes that come here in the summer glow pink as they flap overhead. That's just one of the vivid visuals from another exciting travel trip that will burn bright in my memory until the next time.
Contact us if you'd like to join us on a future adventure to Tarpon Cay Lodge in Mexico.
