Caribbean Coast

Fishing along Costa Rica's Caribbean coast can vary more from one day to another than from month to month. Historically, tarpon fishing is promoted by the lodges on Costa Rica's east coast from about December through mid-May, when the rainy season normally starts, while snook are said peak from about September through November.

But the fish are there year-around, and it's mostly a matter of weather, which can change overnight. If the river drops or the surf is low enough to let you outside the river mouth, it's likely you'll catch fish. We often have a lot of flat days in October and November when tarpon are abundant, and over the past dozen years I have consistently had some of the best fishing of the year in June and July, with tarpon spreading for acres outside the mouth of the Rio Colorado while the lodges were virtually deserted.

Facilities catering to anglers are located at Parismina and Tortuguero, and there are a half dozen fishing lodges around the Rio Colorado, with new operations opening this year at Samay Lagoon, south of Barra Colorado, and Agua Dulce, just north of there. There's even a luxury houseboat that began operation in 19l95 and serves as a sort of floating lodge, moving to where the fishing is best at any given time.

All offer full services, including transportation from San Jose, comfortable accommodations, meals, boats and guides. There are no roads into the area, and access is via the in-country airlines or charter flights, or boat through the Tortuguero Canal system from Limon.;

Most operators on the Caribbean have put in bigger and faster boats in recent years, and are now able to get out the river mouths more frequently when the surf is up, and also able to make the longer run to the less frequently fished San Juan River mouth where it forms the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

Virtually untouched by fishermen for nearly two decades, the San Juan represents a new horizon for Costa Rican anglers. It is an easy run by boat from the Barra, offering an alternative when things are slow closer to home.

The 18- to 23-foot boats now available at some of the lodges also provide an option on those days when the tarpon and snook just aren't biting. Tarpon fishermen on the outside have long found barracuda, jacks, kingfish, sierra, tripletail, cubera, grouper, jewfish and other gamesters within three to five miles from the beach, but with better equipment and some intensive training of the guides, such catches have become routine and fishermen in the past year regularly caught Atlantic sailfish, dorado, wahoo, tuna to over 100 pounds and even a blue marlin.

Light tackle fishing up river in the back waters and lagoons is unsurpassed, especially when the calba, or fat snook (Centropomus parallelus) are running. These are the small snook that swarm the Rio Colorado area from about September through November, sometimes overlapping as much as a month either way. They average about five pounds, with eight and nine pounders fairly common.

Rainbow bass (guapote), mojarra, vieja, machaca, drum, alligator gar and other light tackle species also abound, so bring along that bass rod and a light spinning outfit on your next trip. Apart from the fishing lodges along the northern coast, the Caribbean doesn't really offer much for the serious fisherman. Development of an offshore fishery south of Limon has long been a matter of discussion and conjecture among anglers.

Theoretically, there would appear to be a potential for such a fishery. Marlin and sailfish are abundant in the waters off Panama further south, and anglers out of the tarpon lodges along the northern Caribbean coast regularly find tuna and occasional Atlantic sails, dorado and wahoo outside the river mouths, three to five miles off shore.

Logic tells us those fish should be moving along the southern coast as well, within easy range of the sport angler.

A couple of years ago, Tim Choate, who has long been operating boats on the Pacific coast, decided to do some "research and development" on the Caribbean. He based the appropriately named "R and D" at Puerto Viejo with Ron Hamlin, an experienced fisherman who skippered boats for anglers that have set IGFA fly fishing records for white marlin, Atlantic blue marlin and Atlantic sailfish in Venezuela, the Virgin Islands and Mexico.

If there were fish to be caught in that area, Tim was certain that Ron would find them. Unfortunately, they came up empty.

Fishing regularly from May of '93 through December, Tim said they saw no more than a dozen sailfish and those appeared the last week of May and early April. No tuna, dorado or other bluewater species.

"Costa Rica's southeast coast sits on a circular current, and there are no (large numbers) of pelagic fish coming through," he said.

"Some trips off the coast of Panama were excellent on marlin, but that is too far to run, and locally even the rivers are pretty well fished out, netted to death with very few tarpon and snook," he added.

"There's nothing to speak of inshore, where the water is dirtied by the outflow from the rivers. . .there is some decent bottom fishing, but nothing to get excited about and the weather overall is terrible for fishing with wind, heavy swell and rain."

That's not to say you can't catch something in the area. While it's just not world class fishing, a couple of the resorts to the south offer charters and you can also fish the rocks or book one of the local commercial fishermen to go out for small snapper, jacks, kingfish and maybe a corbina or snook. While Tim's efforts at Puerto Viejo have apparently convinced him that the potential in that area will not provide the sort of action that serious big game anglers expect when spending big bucks for a foreign fishing expedition, there are still fish to be caught in the area.