The Ultimate Fishing Destination - Part 1

If you are thinking about traveling to some exotic fishing location in the near future I have some advice. I know, advice is cheap, but travel is not and if you’re going to spend the money you want to catch lots of fish, view remarkable natural wonders, interact with animals in the wild and come home with pictures and stories to wow your family and friends. Well read on and hopefully you can benefit from my experiences.

I have had the good fortune to fish in a lot of really incredible places over the years. I’ve made dozens of trips to islands in the Bahamas, crossed the Stream in small boats, and fished for marlin, tuna, wahoo, dolphin and stalked the flats for the ghost-like bonefish there. I’ve fished the Keys for tarpon, permit, bonefish and all over Florida for sailfish. My first trip to Venezuela was almost three decades ago and the billfishing on the fabled La Giuria Banks was unbelievable. I’ve fished all the hotspots in Central America, Costa Rica for Pacific sailfish, Panama for sails and black marlin, Guatemala for even more sails and blue marlin. I’ve spent days on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where I caught my first marlin over 1,000 lbs. I was one of the first East Coasters to travel to California for a trip on the famous Royal Polaris during long-range fishing’s heyday, spending 16 days at sea catching fish to the point of exhaustion! This year I traveled to the remote Galapagos Islands, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, where the striped marlin were thick as fleas on a junkyard dog and I hope to return there later this year in search of monster blue marlin.

There are more exotic places on the list, but bragging is not my aim. My experience with fishing travel is extensive; especially when you factor in I am not among the moneyed elite who can take such trips on a whim. But when all is said and done the place I have most fallen in love with and daydream about regularly is right here in the good old USA—ALASKA!

You will find no more beautiful, rugged and exotic place on earth. I’ve been there five times and fished for halibut, silver salmon, the biggest rainbow trout in the world, king and sockeye salmon and even salmon sharks, a close relative of the mako. Each trip was ten days to two weeks and included side trips aboard bush planes with some of the best wilderness pilots and fishing guides in the world and I have not even scraped the surface of what this incredible region has to offer visiting sportsman. Most of Alaska is an unspoiled wilderness with bears, moose, caribou, wolves and some of the most amazing characters you’ll ever meet. The Kenai Peninsula is only a two hour drive from Anchorage where you can catch rainbow trout that can reach 20 pounds, king salmon that can top 100 and see brown bears in their natural habitat. There are hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness, millions of miles of streams and rivers, more coastline than the entire East Coast and fish everywhere just waiting to be caught.

...to be continued on July 8

-Gary Caputi