Fishing Clothing & Accessories

Columbia-style shirts, UV jerseys and the hood-and-buff kit:

three shirts cover most of what Guatemalan anglers wear on the water. The vented button-down, with mesh under the back cape and roll-up sleeves, is the cool one for long hours in a boat. A long-sleeve jersey in thin polyester, often printed edge to edge with a club or tournament design, is lighter again and dries faster after a splash. The hooded version covers neck and ears and saves you the buff, the stretch tube many anglers pull up to the nose on the Pacific beaches. Columbia’s PFG line and Huk are the names buyers search for most, and a flap hat with a neck cape finishes the outfit. The rods that go with it are under fishing rods and reels.

The fabric label, and the Columbia-style shirt that is really a uniform:

the name describes a cut, not a cloth. Uniform workshops make the same vented shape in cotton ripstop with a company logo embroidered on it, and cotton soaks up sweat and spray and stays wet. For fishing, look for nylon or polyester on the care label and a UPF rating inside the collar. A shirt with a business’s logo on the chest is usually somebody’s old work uniform: fine on dry land, wrong for a day in the sun.

Polarized glasses, pliers and the dry bag:

a polarized lens cuts the glare off the surface so you can see a fish following the lure, while a dark lens without polarization only turns the light down. Grey suits bright open water, amber or copper the rivers and the mangrove shade. Costa, Oakley and Ray-Ban are the names copied most. Pliers in aluminium or stainless steel shrug off salt; cheap chrome-plated ones rust shut after a few trips to the coast. Hooks and lures live under fishing tackle. On the boat run out of Livingston or across Lake Izabal from El Estor, spray and afternoon downpours make a light rain shell and a roll-top dry bag for the phone worth more than any shirt.

Branded fishing shirts and genuine polarized glasses:

a Columbia or Huk fishing shirt costs around Q250 to Q650 new in Guatemala, and genuine name-brand polarized glasses start at around Q1,500. A used shirt fetches far less. Polyester barely wears out, but sunscreen, fish blood and a cut that suits one build narrow the buyers, and only a clean, unfaded one in a common size goes quickly. Glasses hold their value better while the lenses are clear: a scratch across the centre is the one fault that cannot be polished out.

Faded collars, scratched lenses and rusted pliers:

hold a used shirt up to the light at the collar and shoulders, where the sun fades it first and sunscreen leaves yellow marks that rarely wash out. On a vented shirt, check the mesh where the cape is stitched on. With glasses, look at a phone screen through one lens and turn them slowly: a polarized lens blacks the screen out at one angle, and a fake stays the same. Look for the maker’s mark etched on the lens and the model code inside the arm, and be wary of a big-name pair with no case at a price that would barely buy the case. Open and close pliers a few times. Grit or a stiff hinge means salt has reached the pivot.

Sizes, lens codes and the case the glasses came in:

give a shirt’s letter size and its width from armpit to armpit, because letters vary between makers, and photograph the care label. Say whether it fished salt or fresh water. For glasses, photograph the etched mark, the code on the arm and the case, and point out any scratch before the buyer finds it. Someone collecting a pair in Quetzaltenango on the way down to Champerico for the weekend will test them against their phone screen on the spot, so bring the case and the cloth.