Sayulita and Punta Mita Surf Casting: December Favors Jacks Over Roosters
Why targeting jack crevalle and snapper at rocky points, not roosterfish, makes more sense for a December surf session on Mexico's Riviera Nayarit.
Somebody putting together spoons, plugs, and jigs for a late-December trip to Sayulita posted the plan on a fishing forum, hoping for a sanity check before flying down. No replies came back.
What they’d assembled was solid gear built for the wrong month. Roosterfish get top billing for this coast in nearly everything written about it, and their reliable inshore run peaks May through October. By December they’re still around, but nowhere near consistent casting range from the beach. A box heavy on stickbaits and topwater plugs, the kind meant to work over a visibly cruising rooster, is built for a fish that’s largely moved past its window by the time a December trip actually happens.
Jack crevalle don’t have that problem. They hold in the same surf zone and rocky points year-round. So does cubera snapper, working the same structure. Neither gets much play in destination write-ups, since roosterfish photographs better and sells the trip harder, but for a December session they’re the actual target, not the fallback plan.
Location matters here as much as which species you’re after. The rocky point at Punta del Burro, between the Punta Mita gate and Destiladeras, is what local surfers call Burros, and the surf guides that track the break there file it under reef bottom with a specific warning worth repeating: watch for urchins on the rocks along with the wave itself. Access itself tells you how undeveloped this stretch is for fishing purposes — the point sits on private property near the Grand Palladium resort, reachable only by a short jungle-trail walk from a specific access road or by boat, and surf guides rate the break itself expert-only given the power of the waves and current there. That single detail tells you something the open sand stretches around Sayulita’s main beach don’t. This is a place you walk in over structure, not stand on flat, easy footing, and the same rock and reef that draws surfers is exactly what holds bait and gives ambush cover to jacks and snapper.
One review from a DIY shore angler who fished this stretch put it plainly: information for independent shore fishing here is thin on the ground, but when the sardines showed up, jacks fed hard right on the surface. That’s the realistic shape of a December session, not a guaranteed daily bite, but a genuine window when bait pushes through and the jacks follow.
Heavy casting spoons and metal jigs in the 1-2oz range cover jacks and any sierra mackerel moving through, and cast further into the wind than a swimming plug will. Save the roosterfish-season stickbaits and poppers for a moment you can actually see a fish or a bait shower breaking the surface, since blind-casting them here mostly means fishing for nothing.
Dawn and late afternoon outproduce midday on this coast in any month. December’s shorter daylight compresses that window further than summer visitors usually plan for.
It’s worth knowing, too, that the local boats working this stretch don’t run out of anything resembling a marina. They’re beached on the sand and pushed off for departure, then beached again on return, which says something about how small-scale and tide-dependent the whole operation here actually is, shore anglers included.
Swap the target species in your head before you swap anything in the tackle bag: plan the trip around jack crevalle and snapper at rocky points like Punta del Burro, keep the spoons and jigs as the workhorses, and let the roosterfish stickbaits stay in reserve for whatever you actually see moving.