From a sea angling perspective, Cuba rates right up there amongst the more unusual locations I have visited. Imagine if you can a reasonably well developed country around the size of Britain with reputedly only one tackle shop. Imagine also a country positioned right bang in the middle of one of the worlds prime sea angling territories that is in many places short of fish. And finally, imagine a country where all the angling infra-structure such as marina's, boats, even tackle and all the jobs that go with it including guides are completely state financed. Based on that information you start to draw up a picture in your minds eye. But if that picture didn't also include some pretty amazing shore fishing then it would not be completely accurate, as there are a number of protected areas where fish can flourish with little in the way of interference from visitors and locals alike.

The story behind the missing fish is quite a straight forward one. When people are poor and they find a way of supplementing their diet they will take it. But that only happens where there are lots of people and where the authorities turn a blind eye. In the national parks this is not the case. Around 10 percent of Cuba is now national park, including a number of coastal areas, which not unexpectedly are home to the type of fishing Cuba has become famous for. This has been likened to stepping back through a time portal to the way Florida was in the 1950's. Bonefish in particular are plentiful. The national park area I stayed in, Jardines Del Rey, is noted for its wade-in fishing for bones, and on a number of occasions I saw anglers carrying fly fishing outfits being picked up by shore fishing guides to go after bonefish and small tarpon. But I had a different agenda. I was there to check out the boat fishing which accidentally led me to some of the best shore fishing potential I have seen in quite a long time.

Jardines Del Rey is a group of around 2,500 small cays, exposed rocks and bits of exposed mangrove swamp off the north Cuban coast. The two inhabited islands in the group, Cayo Coco and Cayo Guillermo, have on them nothing more than a number of four star all inclusive holiday hotels. You'll see them in all the brochures. What the brochures don't tell you is that as a national park, Jardines Del Rey is closed to Cuban visitors. The only local inhabitants you will see are workers bused in each day from the mainland city of Moron and they will have passed through a police check point on the 17 mile causeway linking Cayo Coco with the mainland. Depending on the jobs they do, a few do get to stay over for short stints. Otherwise, its a haven for holiday makers and fish, both of which it seems flock to the place in their droves.

For engineering reasons, the main causeway will have taken the shallowest route available, and while it is possible to fish from it, from what I could see, there wasn't much either in the way of deep water, or of particular features to specifically attract fish. This is not however the case after you reach Cayo Coco. My instructions were to jump on to one of the tourist buses which call in at every hotel, and head for Cayo Guillermo. A short bridge links Cayo's Coco and Guillermo in the corner of which on the Guillermo side is a marina where you can sort out fishing trips. Unfortunately, the man I was looking for had upped sticks and gone back to Cayo Coco marina close to where I had just come from. So, as I had over an hour to kill until the bus returned, I decided to take a walk on to the bridge where I'd spotted a few people fishing on the way in.

It was probably a 50/50 mix of Cubans and visitors. Most of the locals, who had stay over work permits were fishing with handlines, though some did have rods which I'll come back to later. The first visitor I cam across was John Adams from Hull who proudly showed me a big Red Snapper he'd taken on a live bait earlier that morning. He'd actually come in on the same plane as me, so it was still early days for him too in sussing the place out, though he'd made a very encouraging start. A walk further along the causeway turned up a few Canadians, and around half a dozen Cubans including a chap called Oscar who was to become very influential as the week progressed. Oscar had a rod, as did a couple of the others, donated by previous visitors at the end of their holidays. That's the only way these people can get hold of tackle which is something to bear in mind. They ask for nothing yet are always willing to help in any way they can. So why not help yourself by making your suit case a bit lighter for the journey home and help them out too.

The gap spanned by the bridge is quite a deep channel which fish were obviously using as a sort of highway. At either side, it quickly shallows on to some interesting looking flats. Whether or not bonefish would be a possibility is difficult to say. But I'm told that there are small tarpon, particularly after dark which is when a lot of the bigger predators like to feed. There are also a lot of smaller fish which is important. By all means drop the hotel chef a few pesos for some shrimps and squid for bait. But I wouldn't rely on this for the bigger hooks. I saw little in the way of decent fish on anything other than live baits. So be sure and pack some small hooks between size 6 and 10 which are like gold dust over there. Tiny pieces of squid dropped down from the bridge should come up with some small grunts. I found fishing around the bridge legs to be best. You can tell where these are by gaps in the barrier and cracks in the road. But beware after dark as some of these cracks have developed holes big enough to step in to and do yourself some serious harm.

Anticipating problems with either the weather or getting a boat, I had chucked a good selection of shore tackle into my case along with a couple of telescopic rods, a big Shimano baitrunner loaded with quite heavy braid, and a smaller Shimano Stradic loaded with 12 lbs mono. I ended up back at the bridge so often that the people driving the bus would wave as they went by. They would even wait for you, and on one occasion as it was the last bus of the day, we went looking for some people who were not at the stop as arranged. You wouldn't get that sort of service in the UK. None of this was timed to fit any patterns of the tide. We would just go and spend all day. But as you might expect, there were good and bad times. Slack water didn't fish well at all. Nor did peak flow when our 1 to 2 ounce leads struggled to keep the baits down. The best time we found was when the water was flowing through from the marina side of the bridge, though for reasons we couldn't compete with, Oscar always cleaned up just as the flow started coming back the other way after low water.

Each day, as soon as the water was far enough down, Oscar would disappear away into the mangroves on the Cayo Coco side of the bridge, then return an hour or so later with some small elongate live baits in an old paint time which he had caught by hand. “If I have twenty of these I will catch twenty fish”, Oscar said. And he was right. It was every egg a bird; sometimes two if the bait stayed on the hook. The identification books suggest they might have been sand perch. Whatever they were, fish generally, and Crevalle Jacks in particular loved them. But it wasn't only the fact that he had these little fish for bait. Oscar changed his technique when he had these. Always they were free lined into the flow of the newly making tide, carefully taking in the slack line to keep in touch with the bait, with the occasional twitch as it went over weed or eel grass. You simply had to see it to believe it. The problem was that these baits were hard to come by. This however didn't stop him sharing them as is the nature of Cuban people.

Fishing grunts as live baits requires a completely different approach. In part this is due to the way grunts react when put on as baits, but also because the fish most likely to take them, which are snappers, prefer to feed on the bottom. When Oscar fished his small live baits for the jacks he would lip hook them to encourage them to swim up. The grunts were always tail hooked to encourage them to swim down. You could simply anchor them at the bottom with a fixed lead. I caught some Cubera Snappers this way, and the boys with the heavy mono hand lines always fish a lead just above either a whole of a cut grunt. But John discovered it was better to use a sliding lead directly on the line and lower the live bait into the water while keeping the lead in your hand. He would then pay out as much line as the grunt would take down tide allowing it to swim around. Then, when it was far enough away, he would let the lead slide down the line which gave the bait a bit more free reign to wander about as opposed to being fixed in one position which seemed to stimulate the snappers into chasing and grabbing hold.

The locals fishing the hand lines were just as happy with dead grunts or cut pieces. When the bait was in the water, the circular line holder was put on the footpath with a drink tin containing pebbles placed in the centre. This was their bite alarm. If a good fish took it would drag the line holder causing the drink can to rattle and them know. I didn't see a lot of fish on the hand lines while I was there. I don't suppose that heavy mono which must have been 80 pounds bs or more helps. Neither does the use of huge old rusting hooks. Having said this, one of them took a stingray on a cut bait, while another took an excellent red snapper of around 15 pounds which was far and away the biggest fish caught during my visits.

But there were bigger fish about. On a couple of occasions we saw sharks passing through. And after dark, particularly close to the motorboat jetty on the opposite side to the marina, some good tarpon move in very close. Not that fish necessarily need to be huge to give a good account of themselves. Jacks are noted for their hard fighting abilities, and these were without doubt the most abundant fish around the bridge, though more frequently seen were the Needlefish. I've caught needle fish to around five feet long in Mexico, so they can reach quite a size. The ones here unfortunately were about the size of a typical UK Garfish, and not dissimilar in appearance except for the size and number of teeth they have. Very small live baits will taken them, as will free lined strips of squid at the surface. The thing is, having small mouths, they need time to get the hook inside which has the knock on effect of making them hard to disgorge. But when you hook them they really take off leaping and tail walking well clear of the surface.

As I said earlier, my objective here was to get some boat fishing done and not the shore fishing. If I was to return for the shore fishing, I think I would go armed a little differently. Perhaps a stronger rod. Certainly some means of keeping live baits in good nick, and a drop net for the time when that bigger fish comes along, as it inevitably will. I would also pack a good head lamp and consider the possibility of float fishing live baits, particularly after dark, to see if a tarpon might take. I would most definitely stay on Cayo Guillermo as the last bus back to Cayo Coco is around 5 O'clock. This takes around 45 minutes, so presumably a taxi would be expensive. Staying at say the Melia you could walk there is around 10 minutes and could therefore stay as late as you want. Also at the Melia is a rustic jetty, the end of which is reputedly very good to fish from. Unfortunately, just before I arrived, the middle section of it was ripped out by a storm. The intention is however to fix it, or so they tell me. You could also book yourself a wade in bonefish guide from the Baga national park entrance which is midway between the Cayo Coco hotels and the bridge.

SEE THE VIDEO VAULT – Causeway Giants