I just returned from a saltwater fishing adventure in Puerto Rico. The trip will soon be posted as a Road Trip video on my YouTube channel — Cooper Gallant Fishing.
My companions included my brother Colin and Cody Chovancek, who is a UFC fighter. He just won a fight in Las Vegas and signed a contract with Dana White, the CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Cody’s next fight will be in January or February. He is passionate about his sport and enjoys multispecies fishing as much as my brother and me.
The trip was organized by the boys at Monster Energy, one of my bass tournament sponsors. We stayed at No Name Fly Fishing Lodge, which specializes in fly fishing for tarpon and snook.
We mostly fished with conventional bass tackle and light saltwater outfits. My brother does a little fly fishing, but none of us qualify as an expert fly caster.
However, it didn’t seem right to come to a fly fishing lodge and not catch a tarpon on a fly rod. I gave it a shot and, within an hour, caught my first fly-rod tarpon — a 25-pounder. Crazy!
We caught mainly tarpon but also boated some snook. Every day we boated down the coast of Puerto Rico for 30 to 40 minutes in 16- to 20-foot skiffs to fish somewhere new. We fished flats, river mouths and up some of the creeks.
Our guide push-poled us around on flats in 1 to 6 feet of water while spotting tarpon from an elevated platform.
I tried my hand at push-poling. It’s a lot harder than it looks. I told my guide he needed an electric trolling motor to save his arms and back. I don’t think he gave my suggestion much credence.
It was super cool to see tarpon chasing bait over a flat. You’d see a wake or a tail come out of the water. That’s when you’d pick up a rod and try to make a perfect cast to intercept the cruising fish.
We had our best luck casting big fluke-style baits. The tarpon and snook liked the slim profile. That may be why streamer flies are so effective. The biggest tarpon we landed weighed 30 pounds, but we hooked and lost a couple in the 65- to 70-pound range.
We also found time to do some exploring in town, enjoy the local cuisine and visit with some great people. On the last night of our stay, we went to a restaurant that had piers extending over the water. People would throw scraps into the water and tarpon would engulf them. There must have been 100 tarpon swimming around the piers.
We snatched G. Loomis saltwater rods, with Shimano 8000 spinning reels spooled with 50-pound Power Pro braid, and waded into chest-deep water. We baited our hooks with dead live bait and lobbed our offerings under and around the pier.
What followed was a watery explosion of leaping 30- to 80-pound tarpon. They would invariably run under the pier and break off on the supports. We did manage to land a 25-pounder.
It was an amazing climax to our four-day adventure in Puerto Rico. We all wished we could have stayed longer.
A big thank you to Monster Energy and No Name Fly Fishing Lodge for letting me scratch off another bucket list fishing trip.
