Twenty-five miles north of Cap Cana Marina, in water between 2,500 and 4,000 feet deep, there are roughly eighty floating buoys. Each one is a rope, an anchor and a palm frond. Each one holds fish.
They are called FADs — fish aggregating devices — and they are the reason a blue marlin trip out of Punta Cana fits inside a single day.
Key takeaways
- Local fishermen build and maintain around eighty FADs in the waters off Punta Cana
- They sit 25 miles from the marina, which keeps blue marlin inside a 10-hour trip
- They have been part of this fishery since at least the early 1990s
The oldest trick in blue water
Anything floating in open ocean becomes a magnet. Bait gathers under it, and then the things that eat bait arrive.
Capt. Edgar Acra learned this at seven years old, on his first offshore trip after his family moved to the Dominican Republic. Six miles out they came across a tree log drifting in open water and pulled more than twenty mahi and more than twenty wahoo off it in one session.
A FAD is that log, on purpose and on a rope.
How a FAD is built
The design is about as simple as it gets, and that is the point.
Local fishermen tie a palm frond to a buoy and anchor it to the bottom. The frond gives the structure shade and surface, bait moves in, and within weeks there is a food chain hanging under a floating object in the middle of nowhere.
Cap Cana Marina supplies the rope. The fishermen supply the work. It is a straightforward arrangement: the marina gets a productive fishery for its charter fleet, and the fishermen get the gear without putting their own money into it.
Each FAD costs somewhere around $200 to $300 to set and lasts between six months and a year. When one goes, another goes in.
Anchored in 3,000 feet, before GPS existed
The engineering question is the interesting one. How do you anchor a buoy in 3,000 feet of water, and how did anyone find the spot before chartplotters?
The answer to the second part is landmarks. Edgar remembers watching fishermen line up corners of the mountains on shore. When one ridge lined up with another, they were over the drop. Two bearings, no electronics, and a contour map on a sheet of paper that told them the depth.
The answer to the first part is slack. If the chart says 3,000 feet, they run roughly a thousand feet of extra rope. That gives the buoy room to move with the current instead of fighting it.
The result is a FAD that drifts in about a one-mile radius. Southwest current, it sits a mile southwest. Northeast current, it swings the other way. Close enough to find, loose enough to survive.
What lives under them
The commercial fleet fishes these buoys from pangas, drifting live baits. They are mostly after mahi and smaller wahoo, which are the dependable, sellable fish. A marlin comes over the rail now and then, but that is not what they came for.
The charter fleet is after something else. Edgar runs a transducer fish finder to check each FAD for bait and fish before committing to it. If there is life, he stays. If not, he runs to the next one. The larger private boats do the same with omni sonar, which turns the search into something closer to a video game — you watch the marlin move through the spread before it eats.
Mahi stack up so thick around the FADs that the crew will pull baits away from them. On a day when ten or twelve boats are working the same fishery, a mahi is time you did not spend on a blue.
Why these FADs work
The thing worth noticing is that this is not a universal recipe.
Puerto Rico set FADs too, funded by the government, and they have not produced the same fishery. That is 67 miles from the Cap Cana inlet to Mayagüez. Same stretch of ocean, different result.
Costa Rica runs FADs as well, but theirs sit underwater and have to be located with sonar, and they are about a hundred miles offshore. Finding them is a job in itself, and reaching them is an overnight trip.
Here they are surface buoys, 25 miles out, visible from the bridge. That distance is the whole reason this fishery works the way it does for a visiting angler: a full blue marlin day fits in 10 hours, and you sleep in your own hotel bed both nights.
What this means for your trip
If you book the 10-hour blue marlin trip, this is where you are going. The run north puts you in Atlantic water on the FAD line, working buoys until one shows bait.
If you take a shorter day, you stay closer to the marina. That side runs the drop for wahoo early, then birds for mahi, then lobster pots for sailfish in winter. From March on, white marlin bite about three miles off the beach in 800 feet of water — close enough to fight one while you watch people walking on the sand.
Frequently asked questions
What is a FAD?
A fish aggregating device: a man-made floating buoy, anchored to the bottom, that gathers bait and the predators that follow it.
How many FADs are there off Punta Cana?
Roughly eighty in the area, set and maintained by local fishermen.
How deep is the water at the FADs?
Between 2,500 and 4,000 feet.
How far are they from Cap Cana Marina?
About 25 miles, which is why the blue marlin trip fits inside a 10-hour day.
How long does a FAD last?
Six months to a year. When one is lost, the fishermen set a replacement.
Fish the FAD line
Message Capt. Edgar on WhatsApp, or see the 10-hour blue marlin trip.