Great crew, good set up.  Put us on the Mahi early then

Today was the worst individual day of fishing I have ever had. It really is my fault though, I should have known what I was getting myself into with a $350 charter. I’ve never fished this part of Mexico before but it seemed to be priced above the lowest and somewhere in the middle on FishBooker. I’ve also never used FishBooker before so figured the reviews were accurate. I don’t believed that to be true.

We never took the boat above trolling speed to look for fish. We threw the lines out as we were still in the harbor, trolled aimlessly around the rock formations and headed in a straight line out into the ocean. It was clearly an attempt to save gas as the other 50 boats leaving the harbor made a very quick exit towards the horizon in search of better water while we stayed back on our own.

Now if this was my first charter, I’d say, “we’ll that’s fishing.” But it isn’t my first charter. In fact I am a licensed boat captain in the Florida keys and never have I seen such a lack of urgency to catch fish. We trolled the boat slower than we needed too, never picked a new spot or had a plan B, and the “live bait” I purchased was immediately killed and used as dead bait, being improperly trolled on the surface with poor rigging technique. I didn’t want to be rude to the crew, because they were nice guys but had little experience rigging bait. I did attempt to point out at one point how the ballyhoo could be more affectively rigged but didn’t seem to get through the translation barrier. We did see 1 marlin on 3 separate occasions but as we approached it, rather than flanking around it to properly present baits, the captain gunned the throttle and made a straight line over it, scaring it down to the depths all three times.

The kid working the boat was nice as I said and was hustling to change lures but the game plan never change. It was a 4 hour boat ride at best.

The only thing that kept my wife from killing me was the hope of snorkeling, as the crew was aware of before we left the dock. (She’s not much of a fisher). We never snorkeled. Ran out of time.

Anyway, we did see a sea lion at the dock. That was cool.

Also, the old man at the dock, who was some sort of a person involved with our charter, upon our return said we took the wrong boat out this morning. That was the excuse he used for us not catching fish. To be clear, he was the one who boarded us on our boat earlier in the day and said how many fish we were going to catch. (I will not count that against the charter though. Maybe just a language barrier.)

As you can tell, I would not recommend. Spend the extra $200 and get a captain that will leave the harbor before lines are dropped. Lesson learned hard for me this time.

Day 3 of fishing booker once again yielded no fish, no bites no nothing. The crew was quite young and seemed to be cruising aimlessly up and down the coasts. They weren’t working the radios or phones to find out where the fish were biting.  Overall I would not recommend Fishing booker because it seems they only get crews that can’t get hired any other ways I spent over $1000 on 3 trips and got one small mahi mahi. I then booked a boat that I watched come in with multiple flags and proceeded to catch a marlin and 3 mahi mahi…. Buyer beware

We were late going out that morning.  We waited for bait fish and I don’t know why.  I spent $25 on bait fish and we only used one.  No bites at all.  I know it’s fishing, but it was prime time in. October.  Other boats coming in had 4,5,6 fish.