Puerto Vallarta Fishing - 2005
Ever since I took up fishing seriously since the spring of last year, I have tried to go deep sea fishing whenever I am on vacation. Since we have had nothing but cold and miserable weather in Chicago, and I don't ice fish, I have been going practically stir crazy not being able to fish. I mean, there are only so many hours of ESPN Deep Sea Fishing you can watch before you are almost put over the edge.
Anyway, I had been planning on chartering at least one boat like we did in Cancun. However, since we were down in Puerto Vallarta for 7 full days, I decided to charter a boat early in the trip, and, if it worked out, a second boat later in the week.
So Parker and I charted a boat. I knew were in for a good day once stopped for bait.
This was the bait we used.
My god, they were like small perch that we catch in the fall in Lake Geneva. Anything that is going to eat these fish would have to be of considerable size.
We trolled for a little bit and Parker caught this one on a Rapala surface jig.
Parker, however, told the Captain, "I want to use the live bait."
I thought the technique to catch these fish called "Toros" was interesting. The captain, on the bridge, would watch the surface for the fish. The fish would swim in schools and be about 2-10 feet under the water. The first mate would pull one of the baits from the live well, jam a hook through its skull, and cast it right into the school from the front of the boat. Once hooked, and it did not take long, he would run back with the pole and hand it to Parker. Parker would try to bring it in for about 5 minutes, and then I would take over.
On average, each fish would take about 15 minutes to bring in.
On average, each fish would take about 15 minutes to bring in each fish, but you can see from the results it was well worth it.
We caught 6-8 Jack Crevalle's (also know as Toros).
The fish I was holding was about 30 lbs.
Note, we caught a lot more than these fish - to the following page to see: