The Best Damn Fishing in the World

f you don’t care for the casinos, the dance clubs, and the condos, find a boat and go fishing.

Manuel Calderon looks at what’s left of his Black Label, rattles the ice cubes in his glass, and continues his story about the time Ernest Hemingway chartered his uncle’s fishing boat. Over Calderon’s shoulder, across the Malecon, I keep an eye on a couple dozen big boats anchored at the Salinas Yacht Club.

It was 1957 or 1958--Calderon isn’t sure which--when Hemingway and two friends came to Salinas to fish. Next to Calderon’s weathered left hand is a creased black-and-white photograph. The picture is of a young Calderon standing next to Hemingway. The famous writer wears a baseball cap, his white-bearded chin thrust forward.

Calderon, who helped unload his uncle’s boat at the end of Hemingway’s two-day trip, leans back in his bar chair and smiles. “They caught a lot of fish,” he says in the good English he learned in 20 years working the fishing fleet off New Foundland. “They had striped marlin, wahoo, big-eye, black marlin, sailfish, grouper, you name it. But I can tell you this for a fact--there was an empty rum bottle for every fish we pulled off the ice.”

Although Hemingway wrote his son, Gregory, that Salinas had “the best damn fishing in the world,” Calderon doesn’t know if Hemingway made a return trip to Ecuador. The point Calderon makes to his gringo friends is that although Salinas has grown into Ecuador’s largest coastal resort, gaining the nickname “Little Miami Beach” for its row of white high-rise condominiums, the fishing is still good.

“If you don’t care for the casinos, the dance clubs, and the condos,” says Calderon, “find a boat and go fishing.”

At Ecuador’s westernmost point, Salinas is a short boat ride to some of the world’s best fishing. “You go out 25 miles and you’re on top of 20,000 feet of water,” Calderon says, adding, “and you’re on top of the current.” The current he’s referring to is the Humboldt, or Peruvian, that draws a mother lode of fish up from Antarctica and from the lower coast of South America. For variety, the Equatorial Current, to the north, throws a few tropical fish into the mix.

You can book an all-day charter from several storefronts on the Salinas Malecon for $180 and invite four or five friends to join you.

Take it easy on the rum.

David Morrill
For International Living

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P.S. Modern Salinas is a far cry from the village of cinder block and clapboard fishing shacks of Calderon’s youth. Beginning in the late 1960s, new apartment buildings and cottages began to attract the middle and upper classes of Guayaquil and Cuenca. As the resort grew, the exclusive Salinas Yacht Club became a favorite mooring spot for international sailors, and foreigners--mostly other South Americans--began to buy real estate.