Violence and Safety

I have been getting feedback where people ask me, "Why do you travel? It is so dangerous, I could never do that." or "Don't you feel afraid in all those foreign countries because they are so dangerous?" I talked about street safety in my Mexico posts already but people seem to need to hear some of it again.

Well the truth is that the neighborhood in the United States that I lived in just before I left on my trip to Central America had 36 murders in it the year I left. There were also hundreds of assaults, robberies, armed robberies, car thefts, hijacks, auto and home break ins and all the other typical violent crimes found throughout the world in larger cities. So the fact of the matter is that I was actually safer in most of the places I traveled than I would have been back home in the States. People have a strong tendency to feel that crime only happens to others. Crime happens to everybody on a pretty much equal footing no matter who you are or where you are. I could step outside right now and get murdered here in the U.S. just as easily as in Mexico or some other Central American country. So could anybody else. Crime happens.

One trick to remaining as safe as possible is to learn and use street smarts. Avoid stumbling around drunk in dark areas for instance. That is true no matter where you are. Criminals are always looking for the easy mark and a drunk is an easy mark. Drugs or alcohol that get you loaded are equally dangerous. Travel in larger groups for safety also. Five people are harder to rob than one lone person is. Know the are you are in. Now that is not always possible when you are traveling in a new to you area. In a new area ask about safety for the area you want to go to. The locals are usually very knowledgeable about safety issues and are willing to share their experiences. Listen to them. Now I have traveled through a few war zones like in Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Spanish Sahara, Somalia, Malaysia, and Zaire. I don't think the average traveler should travel in war zones. I may have been a little stupid doing that and I admit it. Sometimes wars spontaneously start while you are already there like it did to me in Uganda.

In a War zone combatants sometimes shoot first and don't bother with asking questions later. In Nigeria where I was convicted of being a spy and sentenced to be executed, the war was officially over but the lingering resentments and war mentality were still strong and it almost cost me my life. I Central African Republic and In Uganda the wars started while I was there so I had no warnings. Life happens like that sometimes. But Once I found out about the problems I did my best to stay safe. In the Central African Republic I just high tailed it out of the country as fast as I could. In Uganda I remained in hiding for a week and then left the country fully prepared to run for my life with soldiers shooting real bullets at me if they did not accept the bribe they were offered. Luckily for me they accepted the bribe and we drove quietly into Kenya.

In Cambodia the war came down on us quickly and we fled as soon as we heard and saw what was happening with the killing fields. I felt bad for the other fleeing refugees that we passed that we were unable to help. I hope they made it. I know not all of them did. In Laos I was intentionally in a known war zone even though officially speaking it was a neutral zone. I knew there was war activity going on. I was only able to talk my way out of that situation because I was lucky that my captor was a reasonable person. I appealed to his sense of goodness and lucky for me he had a good heart or I would have been tied to a tree, skinned alive and left for the fire ants eat me in a slow agonizing death.

I have been robbed several times in the States. I got beat up once out in the deserts of Southern California. In each case of the robberies I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I knew it. I paid a price for my overlooking of commonsense. I got a few bruises out in the desert because there were three of them and only one of me but I didn't just take a beating. I fought back and they didn't want to get hurt so after they overwhelmed me they quickly gave up and left the scene. They could easily have killed me but they did not. Again I was just lucky there.

I try to be careful every single place I go even if it is just up the block where I live to go to the store. I immediately look around for threats and any unknown people. I decide how much caution each situation needs and I go with my instincts. I am perfectly at ease turning around and going back into my house if the situation looks threatening to me. I try to avoid any confrontation. I will cross the street to avoid a confrontation or I will run away if I feel that is the best choice. There is no cowardice in fleeing the scene of your potential death before it occurs. I have no pride in a dangerous situation. I will do anything to improve my odds. There are no rules of engagement for when somebody attacks me. I will use any method available to me to defend myself. Screaming is not above my pride either and sometimes shocks an assailant so much to see a grown man scream that they turn and run away saving me the trouble. I will kick in the crotch or face. I will throw dirt or sand in eyes. I will grab the nearest weapon. I will throw rocks or set off alarms in a business by breaking windows to get attention. Whatever it takes.

Guatemala City might be one of the few places I went that was more dangerous than my home neighborhood in the States. Somalia is probably the only other place I was that I would consider more dangerous than my own neighborhood. Both of those places are run by independent entities. In Guatemala it is the drug lords that rule and in Somalia it is war lords that control fiefdoms of various sizes. Guatemala city has one of the highest crime and murder rates in the world. The last day I was there the morning newspaper had twelve pages of murders listed just from the day before. Women disappear at an alarming rate in Guatemala also. Gangs of men pick them up off the streets or right out of their homes to rape and murder them. The world ignores this violence for some reason. Zaire too near Goma is a very dangerous place to be a female of any age because the rape rate is so high and the females are being mutilated also not just raped. This violence against females is being used as a weapon of terror in the war going on there. It works.

So in answer to all the feedback about my safety, I try to be as safe as I can possibly be but I do put myself out there and experience the world first hand. I live my life to its fullest. The option of hiding out in a fortified house in the United States and watching the world through the eyes of television scares me more than getting killed on the streets of Santiago Chile or Kampala Uganda. We all have our pigeon holed places in this world and mine seems to be to wander aimlessly around the world. I relish it and hope that my luck holds out.

Nicaragua side trips

I flew to Granada Nicaragua with a friend of mine. He wanted to take the bus from Quepos to Granada because it was only twelve bucks but it took, more or less, 22 hours to get there. There was no way I could sit in a bus for that length of time. The flight was quick and easy and was under $200 for the round trip flight. We arrived in the late morning. I was given the run around by immigration with my American passport and my friend traveling on a Canadian passport went through quickly with no hassles. We took a taxi to downtown Granada and checked into a nice hotel near the main square. Almost all the cities in Central and South America follow the Spanish tradition of having a main town square in the middle of town. The locals gather in the squares to walk around and socialize.

We went down to have a look at Lake Nicaragua. It was filthy with garbage along the shore. There were plastic bottles and plastic bags everywhere. Out in the shallow water there were some people collecting trash that they could get paid to recycle. We walked along the pathway running next to the lake. There were couples sitting on benches and people walking alone or in couples. It did not take me long to figure out that this was a cruising area for prostitutes and for gay men. We got our look around and went back to downtown. There were a few baseball fields on the road from the lake to the square. Baseball is popular in Nicaragua. If a player can hone their skills enough to play well then there is a chance that the American scouts that come down here might draft them. That is like winning the lottery for them, going from rags to riches. There were no games being played at the moment but some young kids were out in the field playing pickup ball.

For dinner we went to a restaurant that people told us about run by an American that had Southern style barbecue. The food was great and we met some of the local expats at the restaurant. They were gathering to play some texas holdem poker that night. We were invited to play but we declined. Instead we went out on the town. There were a number of clubs that had dancing and big crowds. We checked out a few of them. I was getting hit on by prostitutes all night, some of them were as young as eight years old. I was kind of shocked and disgusted by this.

When I walked across the town square earlier lots of children approached me for sex. They offered themselves to me for coins or food. It was very sad to see. There is a huge pedophile presence in Nicaragua. The country is so poor that pedophiles can actually purchase children from their parents and then molest them as they please. When they get bored with one they just dump them out on the street to fend for themselves and go buy another one. About fifty of them hit on me the first night and I think the oldest one was maybe twelve. There were both boys and girls doing this. The people in the square paid no attention to these kids out hustling sex for a living. It was just an accepted practice. I sat at a cafe near a catholic school for kids 6-12 years old. As they were getting out of school there was a priest and a couple of nuns in their habits standing in front of the school telling the kids goodbye and things. There was a guy with a pickup truck standing almost right next to them asking kids if they wanted to come and have sex with them. The nuns and priest just ignored the guy like he was just part of the scene. I was totally shocked watching this and wanted to go kick the guys ass. I am the one that would go to jail if I did beat him up or something however so I just observed. Nicaragua has a long way to go in protecting their children.

We had breakfast in our hotel the next morning and went to the market to look around. We ended up in a bar/restaurant for lunch and we had a nice cuban sandwich for lunch then proceeded to get bombed on beer. we just sat there all afternoon drinking and watching the world go by. We were laughing at the horse drawn taxis and how they reminded us of cinderella stories and stuff like that. We took some pictures of the taxis when we were hammered. My friend wore a tiara that he saw in a store and waved like he was the queen of England. The taxi drivers were laughing their asses off at him as he pretended to be a queen. We attracted a bit of a crowd before we decided to go back to the hotel and have a nap.

The next day we went out to see a volcano close up. We laughed at the sign that said all vehicles had to remain unlocked and pointed in the direction of the exits in case of an eruption. We were allowed to walk right up to the edge of the crater and look down into it. There was stinky sulfurous smoke and steam rising from the cauldron and the red glow from the lava lit up the deep hole. I enjoyed getting this close but I could only take the smell for a few minutes before I was ready to leave. We went to an older volcano next that had a big deep lake now. We took a boat ride around the lake and listened while the tour guide told us in Spanish all about volcanoes. There were people fishing in the lake and I wanted to fish but they told me I wasn't allowed to fish. We had food at a restaurant next to the lake and went swimming in our underwear like everybody else was doing. Glad I wasn't wearing those old grundies with the holes in them today.

The next day we were going to ride over to the ocean a couple of hours away but the ride we arranged did not show up. We spent the day wandering around town looking at all the architecture. I love the villa style of architecture with the high wall surrounding a compound of buildings and a big private open space in the center. There was usually a garden or a fountain in the center and frequently both. Some of the ones we looked at were posh modern versions of Spanish design and others were more classical with Moorish patterns and things. Some of them were trashed and looked like they had been abandoned for a long time. We were pretending that we wanted to buy one. They were priced from around sixty thousand bucks to a half a million bucks for a very nice large multi-family compound.

We went out on the town again that night after another barbecue meal. My buddy decided to go with a trick but I just talked to some local expats and got an early night. We flew back to San Jose the next morning.

Side trips to Panama

I lived in Costa Rica but I did not have a visa to live there. I was just a tourist. Every ninety days I had to leave the country and then come back to get another ninety days. Some people considered this a hassle but I loved it. It ensured that I would keep traveling around and not just stagnate in one place. I traveled to Panama, Nicaragua, Guatamala, The States, Peru, Ecuador, Columbia and pretty much all over Central America and lots of South America.

Sometimes we drove down to David in Northern Panama. I liked going to David. It was about a five hour drive from my house. Costa Rica has a high import duty on almost everything which makes goods expensive in the country but Panama has almost no duties on anything so shopping there is much cheaper and they have a much larger selection of things to buy. There also are no movie theaters where I lived in Manuel Antonio so I always went to movies when I went down there.

We stayed at the Hotel Pesidente or one of the other nice cheap hotels in David. It was about twenty five bucks a night for a good hotel. There were nice clean hotels for as little as eight bucks a night all over Panama. Food was as cheap as a couple of bucks for a nice meal and beers were seventy five cents. We partied hardy while we were there. Usually we went as a group to make it more fun and more efficient to get our passports updated. There were lots of great restaurants with a wider range of food available in David so we ate out a lot there.

I liked to go downtown on the weekends because there was a cock fighting place, a whore house and the police department almost right next to each other. Cock fighting was illegal and so is prostitution in Panama but there were cops in both places. I don't support cock fighting at all and think it is wrong. I went to the fights to watch the locals bet big bucks on their favorite birds. They got so excited during the fights that you could barely hear in the building. The cops were big customers plus they settled any fights that occurred. The gentlemen's club next door had exotic dancers lazily going through the motions up on a small stage and then girls walked around the room picking up tricks that they took to small back rooms. Again there were police sitting around watching the girls and wandering in and out of the back rooms.

We often went to the casino in David. The casino was huge and was loaded with one armed bandits and all the usual games like texas holdem, craps, roulette and everything else. I played the bandits sometimes and some poker but I preferred to just watch the locals and the tourists throw their money away while I indulged in a few drinks and watched the girls working the crowd.

There are some good fishing outfits that are based in David. The Coral Star and several other mothership type outfits start and end their trips in David. They fish down around Coiba Island which is a few hours cruising south of David. It takes a long time to wind your way through all the mangroves from David harbor to the open ocean but that just makes the passengers feel like they are in a very remote place. You can see monkeys and snakes in the mangrove trees lining the narrow canals that lead back and forth. Most of the mothership trips are for about a week and you sleep and eat on the mothership but you fish on two passenger pangas during the day. You can fish for whatever type of fish you want that way. Some people want to go for that big marlin and some people prefer inshore roosterfish and pargo. Whatever floats you boat.

I would go down and stay at my friend's place a couple of hours south of David to go fishing. It is called Paradise Lodge. Chad is the owner and I was one of his first customers. He bought the land and built the resort by himself. It is quite impressive for a one man project. It is up on a hill overlooking the Pacific with lots of small islands dotting the view west. To the east there are mountains to watch the sun come up over. Very beautiful setting for a fishing resort. Chad had good vision when he came up with his idea. Today he is almost fully booked up with fishing clients. I highly recommend his place if you want to try out some of the world's best fishing around Coiba Island and Hannibal Bank. He has three boats now I think.

We went to Panama City once in a while also. There were cheap package deals with all inclusive hotels and air included. Panama city is a big city with all the usual problems of a big city but if you are careful you can have a very good time there. Taxis are cheap to get around town with and there are lots of crazy clubs and places to go. We often ended up buying lots of stuff at the big malls there. Phones and computers and cameras that were expensive in Costa Rica were cheap and plentiful here. I did the usual trip on the Panama Canal through the first locks on the canal and went to the Canal Museum too. I also took a ferry out to some islands offshore that was a lot of fun to do.

The strangest thing for me about Panama City is its orientation. I think of cities on the west coast as facing west looking out over the pacific ocean. The first time I was in Panama City I got a room around noon overlooking the ocean. I thought I was going to get a great sunset view out my window and to my surprise the sunset was in the opposite direction to what I thought it was going to be. My internal direction sensing was totally thrown off by this. Panama City is on a curving almost peninsula shaped protrusion sticking out from the pacific coast and when you look out at the pacific ocean you are looking east not west. My brain never was able to get that information right so I kept getting lost in the city and normally I am very good at sensing directions.

We also went to a city in the North East part of Panama called Bocas del Toro. Bocas is just across the border from Costa Rica. There is a foot bridge you can walk across. It is an area with a bunch of islands all connected by small ferry boats. The area is beautiful, lush and tropical with nice clear blue water but in my opinion there isn't much going on there. The town is not really a town just a few buildings. If you want peace and quiet then it is ok but for me it just doesn't work. Some of my friends just love the place. To each his own I guess.

Near David there is another small city called Boquete where lots of Americans are retiring to. It is up in the mountains so it is cooler and less humid that the normal lowlands weather. Almost everybody there speaks English and all the signs and everything are in English so if you want a taste of back home this is the place to go. Myself, again I was not impressed by it. I am not looking for a clone of life in the United States but if that is what you like then this is your place. Have fun there. Magazines love to do articles on retiring in Boquete and always rate it as one of the best places in the world to retire to. If you do retire there I hope you like watching satellite tv and reading because the place is not going to cause you to have a heart attack from excitement. I guess I am just not looking for a cloned American experience. PURAVIDA

Drug smuggling

When I first arrived in Manuel Antonio I stayed at the Espadilla hotel with the college students. After they left I moved into Villas El Parque condos. The very first day I stayed at the condo there was a big drug bust out in front of the condos. A ford ranger pickup truck was caught with 2752 pounds of cocaine and pot in the truck. Now remember the payload for a ranger is only about 500 pounds so this truck was so overloaded with weight that the springs must have been bent totally upside down and the bed must have been almost dragging on the ground. The strange thing is that the truck was driving in the direction of Quepos from Manuel Antonio and the road is a dead end at Manuel Antonio. So where did the drugs come from? They most likely arrived by boat at night. The drivers of the truck were two sixteen year old boys who claimed that they had just been hired that morning to drive the truck to someplace north of Quepos. The police let the kids go. All the police in Quepos and in Manuel Antonio had to come to the bust sight and get their pictures taken. The feds came in from San Jose to do the same. There must have been about a hundred cops there.

So what was the point of this truck? I think it was a diversion. There were probably three or four semi trailers full of drugs going by and they used this as a way to occupy all the police so they could get through unmolested and without having to pay bribes to get through. I was impressed watching them unload all the drugs. I sat at the Milagro Cafe and just watched for hours. I wonder how many of those bails went missing during the disposal of the evidence. They made a big deal of showing the drugs getting burned up on the news but they never actually showed the pile of drugs as they were lit. They just showed the burn pile where what was burning was obscured by the smoke and flames. It could have been just bales of hay.

There were a lot of other big busts. They found a submarine with three tons of cocaine in it one day. The submarine was made in Columbia out of two underground gas tanks welded together and a small diesel engine to power it. Technically it was a submersible not a submarine because it did not fully submerge. There were some abs pipes above the water for ventilation but otherwise it traveled just below the surface making it hard to see with radar or visually. Some fishermen saw it and reported it as a possible sunken boat so the Coast Guard checked it out and found the drugs. Three men were inside it. They were arrested and taken to jail. Three hours later they were mistakenly released from jail because of a paperwork mistake. Ya right. How much do you think they had to bribe the jailer to let them out? There are guesses of up to $25,000 but I bet it was more like $500 bucks to get out. Even the Costa Rican newspapers said that they must have bribed their way out of the jail. Nobody bought the paperwork error story. Three tons of coke is a lot of coke.

They also found boats with hundreds of pounds of coke fiberglassed into the hulls. That was fairly common. Usually the amounts were under a thousand pounds but that is still a lot. The perps always got out of jail and were never prosecuted. The Chinese have an agreement with Costa Rica to allow them to fish in Costa Rican waters without paying any taxes because they spent some money building a bridge in the country. Several of their large fishing boats have been discovered with large quantities of cocaine. We are talking more like ten tons with these large boats. Where all the confiscated drugs go I will never know but I bet that most of it continues on its way after the appropriate fees are paid to the local authorities.

Sometimes bales of drugs are found by fishermen floating around out in the ocean around Costa Rica. If you find one more than likely the Columbians that lost it will come knocking on your door. They are very good at finding their lost bales of drugs. They knock on your door and unlike in the movies they are very polite and just ask if you know anything about the missing drugs. If you tell them you have them and they can have them back there is no problem they just take the bale and go. If you lie to them and they find out they just come back and kill you. They will sacrifice a bale or two to kill anybody that lies to them. That intimidates people into always telling everything they know right away and thus helps the smugglers get almost all of their missing bales of drugs back quickly. The Columbians are ruthless about this and everybody knows it. Their reach goes very far and very deep. Basically they can do whatever they want to whoever they want without retribution to them. Their only worry is those pesky American Coast Guard guys.

Sometimes the small boats used for smuggling breakdown or run out of fuel or something. Boats treat smuggles the same as any other boat owner. When that happens the Columbians beach the boat and bury the drugs in the sand until they can get an alternative arrangement to get the drugs back on the road. Sixteen tons were found buried on the beach by the Costa Rican authorities one day. I heard lots of rumors or other buried treasures like this while I was in the country. An occasional semitrailer full of drugs would hit the front pages of the papers. Usually these big busts were timed around elections and the politicians would rail on about how they were going to put an end to this type of lawlessness in order to get elected. My guess is all the confiscated drugs continued on their way after the pictures were taken.

Some of the drugs went by small plane. The small planes would stop for fuel or if they had mechanical problems but usually they flew all the way to Cuernavaca Mexico and did not need to stop in Costa Rica. Several of them crashed and made the news though.

Most of these drugs passed right through Costa Rica. However there is cocaine readily available for local use all over Costa Rica. The quality is usually very good according to my friends that used it. In Quepos the taxi driver all sold it. There was a big drug bust just before an election and a little old lady was arrested for running the taxi cab drug business. Again my guess is that she failed to make a payment on time to the police. The personal use of drugs is not illegal in Costa Rica. The sale is illegal. People smoke pot in public there as long as there are no minors around. If there are minors around the police arrest you for contributing to the delinquency of a minor but not the drug possession. Drug addiction is not considered a crime in Costa Rica. It is considered a disease and it is treated as such. The local police make regular roundups of all the drug users and place them in mandatory rehab instead of in jail. The rest of the world could learn something from this attitude. Costa Rica and the rest of Central and South America have only really had a problem with crack cocaine and things since the 911 event in the U.S. The borders were sealed up tighter after the terrorist attacks and the drugs piled up in Mexico and Central America. The smugglers were forced to unload some locally and they have sold them locally ever since. It has become quite a large problem in some areas of Mexico and the other countries in Central America too.

Wiki has some interesting articles on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco_submarine

Still fishing in Costa Rica

Over the years that I was in Costa Rica I tried lots of different fishing out. I fished for trout up in the mountains that were planted just for that purpose. There were also restaurants around Quepos that had tilapia ponds where you had to go catch your own fish to be cooked for your meal. They just had cane poles with a hook and ten feet of line. They used a bread dough type of bait that you just squished onto the hook then dangled it into the pond until you had the fish you wanted. It was fun to take the locals out to these restaurants because for most of them it was the first time they had ever fished.

I fished on the East coast a few times. The water over there in the gulf is beautiful. Generally it is flat calm and crystal clear blue water with great visibility. It always looked fishy but the fishing was not so good. Up in the north eastern area of the country there was some excellent fishing at different times of the year for large tarpon. They hang out near the mouth of the Rio Colorado and go up the river all the way as far as Lake Nicaragua. Some of them are huge world record sized fish.

I went in the end of November and we were targeting snook and tarpon. When you are fishing for snook you can catch a tarpon so you have to be ready for a giant fish at any time. We fished the river tossing lures into deep holes along the river. Our guide knew where the holes were and did an excellent job of putting us on the fish. We caught lots of snook then we moved out into the river mouth and started to work on the tarpon. We got bites right away but we found it tough to get them to stick. There is an art to setting the hook at the right time and right power. Too early and you miss the fish, too late and the fish spits out the bait or lure. I got to fight six or seven big tarpon the first day of fishing. I didn't land any of them. I have to admit though that I was so enjoying watching them dance above the water that I was intentionally holding my rod up high to encourage them to dance. To land them you should keep the rod lower. Most of the hooks were thrown while the big fish were shaking their heads. It was a fun day on the water and I think every angler in the world should put Rio Colorado snook and tarpon fishing on their short bucket list.

I fished around Bocas Del Toro in Northern Panama also. The area looks like the fishing should be spectacular but I found it to be slow. The sightseeing while fishing is awesome with all the tropical islands and beautiful water. There seems to be structure everywhere that looks like perfect fish habitat but the fish just were not there in numbers or any size. We caught some small tuna and some snappers and barracuda but not much else. I preferred to just swim or skin dive in all the cool little coves and stuff to the fishing. The diving on this side of Costa Rica and Panama is much better visibility than on the west coast so it is much more interesting except for around Coiba in Panama and maybe Canos Island in Costa Rica which both have excellent diving at the right times of the year.

Lake Arenal has some fishing I tried. They have peacock bass there which I wanted to catch. My only day on the lake we did catch some small fish early in the day but then we were blown off the lake by the high winds which seem to come up every day. I like to get on the water at the crack of dawn but we could not get the Costa Ricans to get out on the water early enough. I may have been there at the wrong time of year though. It wasn't my favorite place to fish.

I went fishing out of Tamarindo up in the north west area of Costa Rica. Again we were blown off the water fairly early in the day. We trolled around for nothing but some bonitas. That doesn't mean that the fishing up there is always slow just that we had a slow day where the wind came up strong. I have heard reports from people that had great days on the water for sails, tuna and marlin in that area.

I fished out of Zancudo Lodge in South Eastern Costa Rica and had a great time. A bunch of my friends from California came down and we stayed at the lodge and fished for a few days. We caught some nice sails and a couple of marlin and I had a very good day doing inshore for roosters and pargo. One of my roosters was the largest I caught in Costa Rica. I recommend the Zancudo Lodge for any serious fishermen. I also fished Crocodile Bay. They are over closer to the mouth of the bay than Zancudo Lodge. I only fished inshore there and I caught some huge pargo and lots of roosters. It was a really fun day on the water. Crocodile Bay is an all inclusive lodge like Zancudo Lodge was, both are fairly pricey but they both are great places to go get your fishing urges filled.

I fished one day out of a lodge that caters to the tourists at Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula. It was just panga fishing and we trolled around for a couple of hours close to shore for some needlefish, a barracuda and a few small pargos. I have fished the nearby Drakes Bay at other times for some giant dog toothed snappers and some nice snook.

I went on a multiday fishing trip out of Quepos to Samara which is up in the middle of the Nicoya Peninsula. We fished near Montezuma, Mal Pais and almost as far north as Tamrindo. The purpose of the trip was to let the deck hands have a vacation and do some fishing themselves. We had a blast on the trip. We partied a bit too hardy in Samara the first night and then the wind came up so we didn't get a lot of serious fishing in but the deck hands got to land some billfish themselves for a change. I enjoyed Samara. It is a smaller town with only a few choices for places to eat and drink so they are all crowded and fun to hang out in. There were lots of hot friendly girls around too. Mal Pais is south of Samara and is a famous surfing destination in Costa Rica. It is known for big waves. Montezuma is another small town with a couple of fun bars to party in. The boats there take off from the beach because there is no pier or good harbor. It isn't known as a fishing destination so the fishing boats out of there are mostly just panga fishing. I love panga fishing but the attitude I found with the panga fishing boats here was not my favorite attitude. They kind of just go through the motions of fishing and are not seriously trying to get you on fish. Such is life.

So I fished around Quepos the most of all these places. When the rain lets up around thanksgiving time the dorados show up in big numbers around Quepos. I really love catching dorados or mahi mahi as they are also called. Dorados can change colors and they be green, yellow, white, blue, or almost any combination of colors and patterns from polka dots to stripes or two toned or three toned whatever. They are also great to eat. The largest dorado I saw was around 90 pounds and was caught by a long liner. I love to catch them and hold my rod up high to encourage them to jump and dance on the surface. We fished the garbage lines and any other debris in the water to find them. They could be close to shore or way offshore. There were days when I had to stop fishing because I was too tired from all the dorado especially in December and January around Quepos. That is the best time to fish the area because you can catch almost all the available fish like sails, marlin, pargo, wahoo, snook, dorado and tuna at that time of year. The weather is usually perfect at that time too and stays nice through about May.

I just got a report today from Quepos. My friend caught 9 wahoo, 4 tuna and three sails out of Quepos plus some nice big pargos down at Drakes bay and a bunch of smaller fish in the mangroves around Quepos. PURAVIDA

Inshore fishing Quepos Costa Rica

After a lot of offshore fishing for billfish in Costa Rica I kind of burned out on that style of fishing. The frequently long dry spells between fish got to be too boring and the fish were too easy to land once you learned how to handle them. I preferred to fish with more constant action even if the fish were smaller. That is why I preferred to do inshore fishing or fishing in the mangroves to trolling all day. Around Quepos my most popular target while inshore fishing was roosterfish. The roosters hang out near rocky spots all up and down the shore from the harbor at Quepos. I liked fishing just south of the Manuel Antonio national park near a group of rocky islands and submerged high spots. We would fish for bait first. Lookdowns were a local fish that made a great bait because they stayed alive on the hook for a long time and the roosters seemed to like them. We also used sardinas which were smaller and did not last as long. Sometimes the bait was hard to find and catch and we would lose a couple of hours of fishing time trying to get the bait but such is life. When you drop the bait over and slowly troll it around the rocks the roosters take the bait and swallow it whole. you need to feed them a bit of line and wait for them to swallow the bait before you set the hook or you will lose most of your hook sets. Once on the hook the roosters go nuts. They tend to stay in the area where you hook them and don't generally go on long runs but rather they tend to circle around and go back and forth. The last twenty feet to the boat they just don't want to give up and most of the fish are lost right in this range from the boat. They don't do the tuna death circles but instead they tend to just pull side to side for the last little bit or they dive for deeper water. If they get back into the rocks your line will be broken off by the sharp rocks. One day I was trolling two rods and I hooked up both rods at the same time with 25 -30 pond roosters. Both fish were landed but it was a crazy time trying to keep the two fish from getting twisted together. I had to keep switching rods putting one in the holder while I unwound the other fish and tried to reel them both in while keeping the boat from running into the rocks or the other boats. I was laughing so hard with the double hookup and the craziness of trying to land both fish I almost had to quit and roll around on the deck. I released all the roosterfish. I did have one die on me once but they are a fairly hardy species and normally they revived well.

I also liked to fish for the sierras or spanish mackeral that were common around Quepos. Sierras taste very good at the table. The locals love to use them for cerviche. I think they can be cooked almost any way and still be great to eat. The sierras were common in large schools of fish around the same area where I liked to fish for the roosters. I think they were breeding there the way they sometimes massed in thick balls of fish. When they were all balled up they were difficult to entice to bite. They had other things on their minds than food I guess. I am the same way. The best way I found to catch them was to troll broken back rebel type lures through them at a fairly fast speed. Once on the hook the sierras were fun to catch but they only put up a short battle because they swim so fast. Some of the sierras we caught were up to four feet long and looked more like a wahoo. After a long day on the water I would take some sierra to a restaurant and they would cook me up a feast and then I let them keep the left over fish for themselves and there was usually a lot of it.

Pargo were another target species for us. Most of the pargo were dog toothed snappers around Quepos but there were a few other species also. The local fishermen mainly targeted the pargo at night so the fish were mostly smallish five pounders or so with an occasional fatter one. The pargo were also good eating so we kept some of them for the table. The larger ones I always released because they were the best breeders. We fished the bottom with live sardinas for the pargo. It is interesting that in Panama the fish will willingly and eagerly hit top water lures like poppers but I tried and tried the top water in Costa Rica and I could not get much action with it. Sometimes they would hit the rebels I trolled but most of the pargo I caught on live bait or some on cut bait.

Quepos has several world records for their large snook. To fish the snook we threw live sardinas into the surf line near river mouths. The boats could not sit in the rollers so the way we did it was to get our rigs ready to go then timing the boat to the rollers we would swoop into near the breakers and toss our rigs out then turn the boat around and go back out where we could be as close to the breakers as safety would allow. A couple of anglers died there while fishing for snook when they mistimed the boat with the breakers and rolled their boats over in the surf. You needed a trustworthy skilled wheel man on the boat to fish this style. The locals caught some snook using handlines dangled from train bridges over the rivers that looked to be close to 70 pounds. That is about ten pounds over the world record. I never managed to catch any really big ones but they were always fun to catch. The snook are one of the best fish to eat. I always released any snook of any size and only kept little pansized ones to eat.

The mangroves were loaded with small snook and pargo. We would troll rebels or drift with live bait for them. There were always some fly fishermen that would be fishing around in the mangroves and they got lots of action on the little fish. I didn't have fly fishng tackle so I was stuck with my spinning rods. There were a few monster sized fish in the mangroves I just never caught one there. We only fished during the day in the mangroves because at night the bugs were thick and so were the drug smugglers and I didn't like either of them.

Fishing, Costa Rica and Panama

I love to fish and went about once a week or more in Costa Rica. In Mexico I had only caught small billfish both marlin and sails but here in Costa Rica and in Panama the fish tend to be a lot larger. I was very excited when I started to catch 135 pound sails instead of the 7o pound Mexican variety. But after catching a few dozen the thrill wore off and I found them kind of boring to catch. They start off fighting like a pitbull but they quickly give up and most are landed quicker than ten minutes, especially with the charter captains backing their boats at them. A northern California salmon puts up a better fight than most of the sails did.

I caught my first 500 pound marlin in Costa Rica. I was fishing on a smaller charter boat and I fought it by myself. It took me about three and a half hours to land it on the light tackle I was using. My arms and hands were cramping badly by the time the fish tired. We released it after some pics next to the boat. Then the idiot that was taking the pics for me dropped my expensive camera in the water as we were reviving the big fish. I lost my camera and the pics of my big fish. I was kind of annoyed and very tired. My arms were sore for days. On the way back in to port the captain of the boat handed me a report form about our day on the boat to fill out and I just looked at him and laughed. I could not write with my cramping hands from fighting the big marlin. I asked him if I could dictate it to him and he laughed and told me I could fill it out in a couple of days for him.

The largest marlin I have ever personally seen on a boat was in Panama. I was fishing with captain Chico out of Paradise Lodge at Hannibal Banks just offshore from Coiba Island Panama. We were catching some tuna from 15 pounds to one I caught that was around 150 pounds. After I landed the 150 pounder I told them I was tired of tuna and that I wanted to fish for something else. Chico suggested trolling for marlin. I told him sure that sounds good I will get a chance to rest up a bit. He laughed at me when I said that.

I have spent many hours on boats trolling for marlin and there are typically some long dry spells doing it. Chico told me he could hook a marlin in ten minutes or less and he was willing to put any amount of money on the bet. I just happened to have fifteen hundred bucks cash in my pocket and I was tempted but there was something in his cocky voice that stopped me from making a huge bet for the easy money. Instead I just bet him a hundred bucks. He accepted the challenge. He harnessed about a fifteen pound yellowfin that we had just landed by threading a string through the eye sockets and tying it to a big circle hook on an eighty pound rig with a bimini twist. With a big grin he dropped the yellowfin over the stern and started to feed it some line. The fifteen pound yellowfin was thrashing on the surface as it slowly went away from our boat. We were all watching it and laughing about big bait equals big fish. Then with the big bait about twenty to twenty five feet behind the boat and about twenty seconds into our ten minute bet we were looking at the baitfish and all of a sudden it exploded and a grander came flying completely out of the water engulfing the bait like it was a raisin. The big blue marlin scared the captain. The captain thought the thousand pound fish might land right in our boat and he hit the throttle full forward to get us out of the way. I don't think the fish would have landed in the boat but it would have been close. We pulled away about sixty yards or so and slowed down to fight this monster marlin. It was my fish but I had just landed a 150 pound tuna and my arms were a bit tired from all the fish I had fought already that day. I also remembered how much work my last big marlin was and I handed the rod to my fishing buddy. There was nothing for us to do but sit and watch this gorgeous big fish tail walking on the water for about twenty minutes. It never ran. It just stood on the surface and danced this way and that way shaking its head violently. The setup we were using was holding well. Then the fish decided to go on a run and my buddy holding the rod was yanked over to the rail as the reel sang out its high pitched fish running song.

My friend was having a hard time just holding on to the rod without getting pulled over. Chico relaxed the drag a bit and as he did my friend put his barefoot feet up against the gunnels to brace himself against the pulling fish. The boat picked this time to do a little dipity doo and we had a big rock. My friend lost his footing against the rail and his feet slid down the side of the boat. Unfortunately for him the gaff was hanging on a bracket right under his foot and as he slid his foot down to the deck he gaffed himself right in the center of the arch. The gaff hook went right through his foot from the bottom to the top and was stuck there. He let out a scream like Jamie Lee Curtis and immediately let go of my rod with the big marlin on it. Chico was a fast thinker and a true fisherman he ignored the gaff protruding from the foot of the dumb ass and he grabbed at the rod as it went flying down the rail with nobody holding on to it. He reached out and grabbed the rod just at the absolute last second before it disappeared forever into the Pacific. He put one hand in front of the reel and one on the butt and yanked the rod back into the boat. When he did the line went tight against the big marlin just as the fish did a big head shake and that was the end of the big fish fight. The high pitched ping when the line broke was a good indication of just how hard this fish was pulling. The marlin continued to dance on the top of the water for over ten minutes even after the line had broken. We sat and watched it as the guy with the gaff in his foot was on the floor ready to pass out and flopping around like a halibut on the deck.

I finally turned to treat him. He was yelling quick quick get me to the hospital. We were at Hannibal Banks remember about two days from medical care if we hurried. I looked at the wound with the gaff still sticking in it and I had to move the guy so that I had some space to get the gaff out. I yanked it out when I got enough space and the blood gushed out. The whole deck was covered in blood like during an albacore bite. Our guy was almost passed out. We were kind of hoping that he would because he was being very uncooperative and loud. He was screaming that we were letting him bleed to death. I tried to explain that I wanted the wound to bleed to clean it out so that he would be less likely to get an infection from the dirty and far from sterile gaff that went through his foot. He pointed out how much blood there was on the deck and I told him that it just looked like a lot of blood but that it was mostly water. If he had lost this much blood he would already be out cold I told him. After what I thought was a good amount of cleaning blood came out of the wounds, one on the bottom of his foot and one on the top, I put some direct pressure on the foot and had him raise it up higher than his heart. The bleeding quickly stopped. After about fifteen minutes I bandaged the foot with some antibiotics and gauze that we had with us and wrapped a plastic garbage bag around it to keep it clean and dry. The guy never stopped crying about how we had to race him to a hospital. We were tempted to have him accidentally fall on a hammer to knock him out if he didn't shut up soon. Eventually he quieted down and we were heading back to the lodge. He healed nicely by the way with no infection or problems what so ever. Know your first aid if you are going to be a couple of days away from a doctor or medical care.

On the way back to the lodge we were doing about twenty four knots and we were rehashing our fine day of fishing when I felt someone looking at me and I turned around and looked over the side of the boat. I had to let out a primal grunt of some sort when I looked down over the side and there was a big eyeball the size of a saucer looking back up at me. A whale was swimming right next to the boat and looking up at me while we were doing over twenty knots. I had no idea that they could even swim that fast. The even weirder thing is that the whale was an albino white whale. The captain let up the throttle a bit and slowed the boat down so that we could get a picture of this weird whale. Our cameras were all stowed and before we could dig one out the fish let up and pulled away from our boat. We stopped to watch it swim away and it stopped and turned around to look at us. We though wow what a friendly whale. Then the motherf***** started to swim on top of the water at ram speed right at our boat. Holy crap Moby Dick. The captain tried to hit the throttle but before the boat could get moving the whale was on us but at the last second he dipped under the boat and did not touch us. We started to get up on plane and we hightailed it out of there.

We stopped on the way back to port near some rocky shoreline to plug poppers for some pargo. There are lots of pargo in the hundred pound class around Coiba. We threw our plugs for about an hour before we hooked up with our first big pargo. The fish was like a giant largemouth bass the way it hit the popper on the surface and came flying out of the water. The hits are truly awesome to watch. But the minute the fish is hooked you better start reeling because if the big dog toothed snappers get back to their lairs in the rocks the fight is over. You have to have a tug of war with them to keep them out of the rocks and I mean tug of war. Those big pargo are a blast to try to land. The rod folds over as far as it will go. I was using a spinning reel with the drag cranked down with pliers and had hundred pound spectra for line. My sore arms almost gave up but I landed the first one and it was about sixty or seventy pounds. Just a little one Chico said. We continued to fish until our fingers were raw from throwing all the ten ounce poppers as far as we could over and over again. We lost a few more fish but landed some too.

Then we decided to troll around one last spot before we stopped for the day. We put out the trolling setup and started to troll around an island. The long rod started to scream and it was a very nice wahoo. I landed it but I shared the fight with Chico and my fishing friend. I was so tired by now. All these giant fish were giving my arms a serious workout. We caught yellowfin tuna, pargo, marlin, wahoo, blue trevally, bonita, barracuda, roosterfish and mahi mahi that day along with some jacks, needlefish and blue runners. A fisherman's paradise for sure and hence the name Paradise Lodge I presume. Just another great day of fishing in Panama with Chad and Chico.

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