When the Gómez family invited me to visit their new lodge in Manta, Ecuador, I figured it'd be the perfect opportunity to answer my mother's quiet pestering to take my stepfather on an exotic fishing trip. After all these years, we'd finally get a chance to spend some quality time on the water. And quality it was.

My stepfather and I have always enjoyed each other's company, but we'd never really fished together. It's ironic because we've both always fished. However, I never made it into that intimate circle of anglers he cruised with. But when I landed a position at Marlin, he saw me in an entirely new light.

Don't get me wrong: He had invited me on a few trips when I was a teenager, but his marathon runs to the Northeast's deepwater canyons didn't exactly sound like fun to my 16-year-old ears. He'd leave the dock in Connecticut at 4 p.m. on a Friday, then hit Montauk, New York, around 6 o'clock to top off on fuel and buy ice, bait and provisions. From there, he'd head offshore -- way offshore --typically running 60 to 100 miles in his 29-foot Luhrs walkaround. He'd troll all day and chunk all night at the Fingers or Hudson Canyon with yellowfin on his mind. Nobody would hear from him until midnight on Sunday. I usually opted to join my buddies and try my luck at catching girls.

Somewhere after college, my stepfather and I discovered that we actually fished well together, and now, here we were, heading to the equator to fish the November full moon at Blue Marlin Lodge, hoping that it would live up to its name.

A Family Tradition
In June 2001, Luis Eduardo Gómez and his sons Fernando and Carlos decided to build a fishing lodge in Manta, Ecuador. The family fished the area frequently but mainly stayed in Salinas, about 80 miles to the south. Salinas offers a world-class yacht club complete with all the amenities one would expect, such as premier docks, a pool, a clubhouse and dry-dock facilities. But it is a resort town that bustles only a few months out of the year. Manta, on the other hand, stays alive all year as one of the most active tuna ports in the world, as well as offers a year-round fishing season.
 
"We decided to build in Manta because in Salinas we already had everything to run an operation, and we were looking to expand it," Fernando says. "Our captains prefer to fish in Manta due to the larger numbers of blue marlin strikes."
 
To open the lodge in style, the Gómez family hosted a group of friends in late August 2002 for a gentlemen's tournament. In two days of fishing, eight boats raised 117 marlin, mostly stripes and blues.
 
"Before Luis built Blue Marlin Lodge, only a few Ecuadoran anglers moved their boats to Manta during the July-to-October season, when Salinas becomes too cold for blue marlin," says Francisco "Paco" Sola, a lifelong Ecuadoran fisherman. "The late Jaoquin Tamariz, Santiago Maspons and IGFA rep Victor Estrada were pioneers in the Manta area."
 
With an active crew now in place in Manta and fishing on a regular basis, much is being learned about the fishery. Rick Alvarez, who books trips around the world through his company, South Fishing, began fishing in Ecuador in the early 1980s. Alvarez also serves as the international coordinator for the Salinas Yacht Club Invitational Billfish Tournament. "We're getting more data now, and it's getting easier to predict the fishing," he says.

The fishing off Ecuador is highly dependent on the prevailing currents offshore. The Humboldt Current runs up the South American coast from Antarctica, bringing along with it nutrient-rich cold waters. This current collides with the local equatorial current, referred to as the El Niño current that flows in from the north and brings in warmer water. The currents change from day to day, sometimes pushing the perfect 75-degree marlin waters far offshore and sometimes vice versa.

"When the Humboldt Current is dominant, it brings in cold water, and the fishing shuts down," Alvarez says. "But when the opposite occurs, the warmer water fills the area with bait, and the fishing can be excellent."
 
Ecuador experienced an El Niño year in 1983 that altered the fishing seasons and available species entirely. The currents changed and never went back to their original flow patterns. Before El Niño, black marlin were more predominant than blue marlin, but that's no longer the case. The peak fishing times also changed. In Manta, action is best around the end of the year; in Salinas, the fishing blows up at the beginning of the year.

"You'll have fishing opportunities in Manta almost every month of the year," Fernando says. "Sometimes marlin get difficult to find, but you can always find other species, such as big wahoo and tunas. In the past two years, we found the marlin fishing was much better from July to January in Manta, and January and February in Salinas."

Species Variety
When the fishing lights up off Ecuador, few places can match the opportunity to catch so many different species. Striped marlin, blacks, blues and gigantic sailfish commonly pounce on the huge horse ballyhoo the local boats use. You need only look at the 2001 Salinas Yacht Club tournament to see this fishery's potential: 29 boats raised 367 billfish, catching and releasing 158 in three days.
 
My stepfather and I fished four days out of Manta, the first aboard the Umiña, a 35-foot Hatteras, with Capt. Adolfo Panchana commanding the bridge. We left before sunup and headed 25 miles offshore before we started our troll. We worked along the 90- to 250-fathom edges, which Fernando refers to as "Marlin Boulevard."
 
After a slow morning, we found a pod of frigate birds over a scattered school of flying fish. On the third pass, the call came from an excited mate: "Azul, azul!" He pointed to an estimated 250-pound blue marlin on the left short. The fish wolfed down the purple-and-black Mold Craft and charged at the boat. Panchana sped up to keep the fish out of the cockpit, and we were on.
 
I jumped into the chair as my stepfather and the mate cleared the rods. The blue marlin peeled off a few hundred yards but never jumped. I got the fish to the boat, and we finally got a good look at it before it took off again. The second time the fish came to the boat, the mate nabbed the leader and released it. Not a bad way to start off the trip.
 
Later in the day, we got a blind hit on the same lure. The fish ran off a bunch of line before spitting the hook. The captain said he saw the fish and that it, too, was a blue.
 
As we walked down the dock to the boat on the morning of the second fishing day, Panchana informed us that the currents had shifted. Instead of running in their normal north/south flow, they had shifted to the west. The captain decided to head south and fish in between Manta and Salinas, an area where he had seen much success in years past. My stepfather caught a 68-pound wahoo, but we never saw any billfish. The currents didn't cooperate on day three, either, but we made the best of it, catching a handful of dolphin and another big wahoo. Finally, on day four, conditions improved, and we found a couple more blue marlin. We raised two fish, but never got them to bite. Luckily, the dolphin saved the day as we corralled a huge school of high-flyers.
 
The bite was slow, but we had to give it up to the crew. Each day Panchana took us in a new direction, looking for the ideal water. We traveled 40 miles to the south, 45 miles straight out to the west and even ventured 20-odd miles to the north. The currents are unpredictable, but the crew did their best to find a bite. The lunches the mate cooked for us each day and the stories my stepfather and I swapped made the time fly by.
 
"I recommend fishing at least five days in Ecuador," Alvarez says. "You might get bad current for a couple of days before you hit a couple of incredible days. There's more variation, but the fishing can really impress you."

Bigger and Better
Although the fishing runs hot and cold in Ecuador, one common denominator runs through it: There are big fish here. Bigeye tuna frequently pass through these waters offering some fantastic battles with one of the ocean's toughest fighters. Five of the current IGFA world-record Pacific bigeye catches come from Ecuador. These include Jorge Jurado's 236-pounder on 30-pound line taken in 1993, Francisco Sola's 375-pounder on 80-pound in 2000, and Antuan Taleb's 304-pound bigeye on 50-pound line in 1985. Helen King also caught the women's 50-pound line class world-record Pacific bigeye, a 240-pounder, back in 1969 off Salinas.
 
As for the Pacific sailfish, a look at the IGFA World Record Game Fishes book shows five current records taken in Ecuadoran waters, including Carl Stewart's 221-pounder in 1947. The sailfish don't show up like the striped marlin and blues, but when you do find them, they've got shoulders ? often bordering on the 200-pound mark.

The marlin can grow to gargantuan sizes off these shores as well, though most blues average 300 to 400 pounds.
 
On our last evening in Ecuador, we were invited to have dinner at the Gómezes' home in Guayaquil with the who's who of the local fishing scene: José Antón, Jorge "Pancho" Jurado, Ernesto Jouvin, Norman Pichardo, Enrique Weisson and Sola. These anglers are the closest of friends and have been fishing together for years.

We sat back and laughed with them and listened to their tales of big fish. Each man can tell a story of an 800- or 900-pound blue marlin they weighed before moving over to catch-and-release. Jurado leads the pack with the largest blue marlin taken off Ecuador, a 1,014-pounder he caught off Manta in 1985 that stood as the 80-pound IGFA record for several years.
 
"The two largest fish I've ever hooked were in Ecuador, and I say 'hooked' because both of them got off," Alvarez recalls. "The first was a big black ? it had to be a grander ? that I hooked on a 50 in the mid-1990s. It was a big fish. That one spooled me before we could chase it down. Later in the 1990s, I hooked the biggest blue marlin I've ever seen. That one pulled the hook. Those fish and the friends I've made in Ecuador are what keep me going back."