The goal was to introduce a young fella (and his mom) to salt water fishing and that’s what happened on this trip!
Capt Jeremias understood exactly what was hoped for and delivered much, much more! Not only did he provide us with a good history lesson of the region for us, but he took us almost straight to the fish.  Making it look easy!
First Mate Martine was obviously experienced in helping first timers understand how to use the varied equipment, he also landed each catch for us with ease.  In the end, he also whipped together some excellent fresh chevchi while we were taking some great pictures of our catch.
Another extra side benefit with this trip was a bit of in/close to shore snorkeling - complete with plenty of fish to see and a couple of large rays for great memories.
In short - mission accomplished, a great day fishing!

WE WILL BE BACK!

If you are looking for a great boat with a friendly captain, JLC is your spot! Captain Jeremias got us on fish even in some less than ideal conditions. I wanted to target multiple species with multiple methods and we did exactly that! He is honest and truthful about what is available and forward about what needs to happen to catch fish. You can confidently put your trust in him to receive an excellent day on the water.

It was a beautiful day on the water, not much wind or surf.  Which was a little painful, because generally that is less productive condictions compared to more chop. I really liked that we could troll, jig, or use poppers.  I’ve been wanting to get a large predatory tropical top water popper eat my whole fishing career and haven’t done it yet, so I was happy to get reps in… too bad there wasn’t enough chop to make it appetizing enough this day.

Jeremias (Skipper) and Martin (Mate) were great.  We started with trolling but didn’t catch anything for the first few hours. We switched to jigging a few high current edge zones, hooked up but lost a 4-5 barracuda due to lines being severed by the fish, they also lost 4-5 expensive lures in that process. We moved to jigging for sharks. We hooked a large Reef Shark and fought it for a bout 30-40 mins but another boat drove by cut our line in their prop.  Which was frustrating for everyone and not JLCs fault.  It is cool that JLC is a eco tagger and can fish zones off limits to other guides for sharks to help tagging and tracking that species.  Cool to be part of that.

In the last 30 mins of the trip after not landing any fish we moved to a spot to jig and caught a nice sized Almaco Jack (Longfin yellowtail close to an amberjack) at around 400 ft. The fish was hit twice on the way up, once by a Barracuda and the other by a shark, most of it was intake though. It was great to land a fish before shutting down for the day. Jeremias cleaned and filleted it for us and gave us some options to get it cooked up. We took it to a nearby restaurant called Latitude 20 that cooked it up for us (rolled the dice on it got lucky, no Ciguatera).

Make sure to bring any booze, beers, snacks you may want because there were only cokes and water supplied.

I would use JLC again, you can watch for weather and try to find days where the wind will allow for a little more chop and find peak times to fish, but it’s called fishin’ not catchin’ for a reason and catchin’ doesn’t always work for a part-time anglers vacation schedule.  Get more time on the water and enjoy the education a local guide can give you for a fair price.  If I was to do it again I think I would go to the easy jigging spots to land some easier even smaller fish to start the day for everyone in the boat.  Then move to other move to more difficult species, but who knows if that would have been most productive.