Captain Juan and Mate Pedro met us at Nuevo Vallarta Marina for a daytrip of what was going to be offshore. The weather was good and the crew was great - highly recommend them. The boat was clean and presentable, and really had no complaints until we got onto the bay and the Captain tried to bring the boat up to speed. It could not get on plane due to a horrible vibration - since I’ve worked on or on the water my whole life I suspect it was two things: a bent propeller (or two) or a bent shaft. Anything over clutch speed rattled us to death - fortunately for us the majority of the day was at idle speed, thank goodness.
The mate was awesome, and worked for us trying to find something to bite. Captain was good too. Unfortunately for us nothing was biting for the first 3 hours into the trip - not a single bite. Our excitement for the day was seeing turtles, ahem, make love at the mouth of the bay.
Around the third hour we started getting bites - lots of them - and it continued for a good 90 minutes. We pulled out bonita after bonita and kept them for eating later. We caught a couple of other fish and they were thrown back and caught what we think was a tuna which the mate kept for himself - not at our recommendation - he wouldn’t clean it or offer it to us but kept it alive in the well. hmm…
We ended the trip about 2 hours short, but still paid for 8 hours because after our 90 minutes of excitement the crew moved along to try and catch Dorado closer in the bay - and we returned to not a bit of excitement from then until we pulled the plug. It didn’t help the kids were not feeling well when there wasn’t anything going on, and my son puked just before we started pulling fish out.
We cooked the fish that night and made fish tacos. The food was delish but took a lot of effort to finish cleaning especially with dull hotel knives.
I would do the trip again, paying closer attention to what was biting - and probably not for 8 hours. If fish are biting 8 hours goes by quick but if not .... time drags on. For $680 (before a $100 tip to Juan and $40 to the Captain) I did not feel like we got our $ worth on this trip.
Captain Juan and Mate Pedro met us at Nuevo Vallarta Marina for a daytrip of what was going to be offshore. The weather was...
Hi Daniel, appreciate for your comments, otherwise we won´t know, we´ll talk to captains and mates, all the fish is for the clients, client can take as much as they want and if there is any left, then is for the crew, and they are supposed to clean the fish, we make sure not to happen again; regarding vibration apparently quite a few trips before they hit a wood or something and ever since we been having a hard time with shafts and propelers sending it to local shops but with no... More