Cuba's northern coastline offers some of the best fly fishing options in the whole of the Caribbean. The cayos (islands) hold large numbers of local tarpon. In some of the cayos you will find large schools of migrating tarpon, en route to their spawning grounds.
One of the more interesting destinations for giant tarpon is Cayo Santa Maria. The area has become well known thanks to several organisations who manage the area: Solid
Adventures, Casa Batida and Planet Fly Fishing. By comparison Cayo Guillermo, Cayo Coco and Grande Paredon on Cayo Romano are not as well known, but are equally worth your time.
If you’re competitive (and what angler isn’t) you might want to try for what is known as a “Grand Slam”. Since the main big fish - tarpon, permit and bonefish - can be caught the whole year round. The idea of a Grand Slam is that you catch all three species in one day. But if that’s too much of a challenge there are plenty of opportunities for more exciting fishing. You could potentially catch barracudas, groupers, jacks, trigger fish and the Cubera Snapper. The Snapper, by the way, is a really hard fighter in spite of its modest size.
We’ll bring you more about Cuba next time in our continuing series on fly fishing around the world.
