La Gomera is the epicenter of blue marlin fishing in the Canary Islands. During the summer months, Marina La Gomera hosts numerous boats from the other Canary Islands and from even further afield, all drawn to the island for the hot marlin bite, the great food, beautiful nature and the splendid climate.
Fishing starts within 10 minutes of leaving the harbour and, except for the odd visit to the wind lines on either the Eastern or Western edges of the island, occurs in the calm waters in the lee. Due to the volcanic nature of the island the seabed drops away and great depths are reached just a couple of miles offshore. The warm water is found here and has a deep blue, almost purple colour. The currents bring all manner of sea life with it, including baitfish and, inevitably, a variety of pelagic predators which are the quarry of the sportfisherman. The conditions remain favourable for marlin fishing for a very large portion of the year, but the main season occurs from May to September, though lesser number of blue marlin are caught in the months before and after the primary season.
With lots of large bigeye tuna around for most of this year, we started our marlin fishing season in May and hooked up with a 650 lb blue no more than 90 minutes after setting our lures. Two days later we had another 600 lb marlin – not a bad start! The middle of the 2021 season was a bit slower than usual, though, the marlin seemingly concentrating off Gran Canaria in late July, though we still caught a few (including a nice 550) and, inevitably, lost the largest one we hooked this year (over 700 lb). The late season heated up with a bit of a purple patch in late September and into early October, surprisingly enough around the time of the unfortunate volcanic eruption on neighbouring La Palma. Though we did see a few smaller marlin at the beginning of August, La Gomera is primarily known as a big marlin destination and this year was no different – the average size of the blue marling we saw and caught this year exceed 500 lb!
Each season is, of course, slightly different and we will now start focusing our attention on targeting other game fish as we go into fall – more of that in a future post. In the meantime and if catching large blue marlin is your thing, plan a trip for summer 2022 – we’d be happy to show you why we love this fishery so much!
