Costa Rica Fishing Reports

So our buddy Glen has been showing up in my reports for years now and has caught almost everything that Costa Rica has to offer in the salt water, except his marlin.

With the marlin bite this season just about as hot as it can be, i let Glen know that he had a very good shot today. We started early as usual but today I made the decision to fish closer to home. At about 14 miles from Quepos we put the gear in the water and started working a current that lives in that area.

It wasn’t but about 30 minutes after we started trolling that a mid sized blue briefly showed up behind the short starboard corner only to disappear below the surface again. A second later he crashed on a plastic, skirted ballyhoo on the port side. When i locked up and set the hook, we got a brief jump and he came unbuttoned. Hmmpf!!

Well we kept up with business as usual and it didn’t take long before another marlin, this time a black, boiled behind the same short corner before crashing the short port corner rod with a stout pink and blue Marlin Magic lure and he was on!!

Glen made short work of the beast and we soon had it by the bill for some quick photos and a healthy release. Glen had his marlin.

So May has come and gone and the fishing was right on the money. The sails were a little slow early on, but picked up after the first week and the marlin have been chewing. Our pat Craig and his girlfriend spent an hour pulling on this one.

May is also a great month for the spawning snook. Big snook line up in the river mouths just waiting for us to come along and take them out for dinner, and that’s just what we have been doing. The 2 in this photo are actually very nice fish but they are dwarfed by the giants holding them

Well the end of march has sent the fishing into a lull both inshore and offshore. The first couple weeks of April have been very slow offshore with boats struggling to catch a single sailfish. No, it’s not the end of the season, just a slow period that can come along any time of the year and it will change again.

There have been a few Wahoo showing up and we’re anxiously awaiting the hoo fishing that will be starting over the next few weeks and lasting until January.

The fishing has been holding strong with lots of sailfish offshore and Roosterfish all over the beaches. Typical days offshore we have been releasing 6-8 sailfish with the occasional dorado(mahi mahi) and marlin.

Well, the fishing this year has been great so far. January produced great fishing and so far February has been some of the best marlin fishing we have seen in a long time. The sailfish have been around in good numbers and we’ve been catching marlin most days! Inshore has been strong and with good bait around, the fishing should stay good.

Awesome marlin bites the last few days with 3 releases on January 31st. Most of the fish are in the 200-350 pound range with some 400-600 pounders being seen daily. The last weeks group of 3 anglers released an amazing 5 marlin on top of all the sailfish, dorado, snappers etc…still waiting for some video.

Well it’s been awhile since I have been very active here with the fishing updates, but I’m gonna get back on it again. The fishing has been good and we are now over a month into the ‘prime’ season and though the fishing has been good, the effects of the financial state of the world have been obvious. Tourism has been way down this season and not only are there many boats sitting on their moorings, but the hotels are not nearly as full as they should be at this time of year.

The sailfish have shown up in decent numbers and the dorado count was through the roof over the last few months and we are still catching them on a regular basis. Offshore bottom fishing has been very good with several snappers in the 40 to 50 pound range being hauled aboard the K2.

The tuna bite has also been very good with several fish to 350 pounds having been caught over the past months.

Glen is a long time client now and fishes with me about 3 times a year, days like this are why…

The morning started out great as before we even got to where we were headed, we slowed to a troll long enough to drop back a single ballyhoo and drag it past a pair sailfish that were sunning themselves. They were hungry and one took the hoo, fish-on. We released it and got back up on plane still having someplace to get to.

This time it was a lone tree trunk that had to hold a dorado or two that made me slow to troll speed again. I was about to give a seminar in the effectiveness of a Williamson plastic ballyhoo. First we drop back a single plastic hoo and just as soon as it gets where it needs to be, hammered! First dorado on the deck. Turn around, drop back plastic, hammered, repeat. As Glen was fighting the fourth mahi, I tossed out an 8 ounce diamond jig and we had #5, or wait, that’s #5 in the rod holder waiting for Glen to finish with #4. At #7 we called in a nearby friend and left them with the log and throttled up once again for where we were headed. There had to have been 40 dorado on this single log and we could have easily spent a half a day pulling life from the area, but we had somewhere to go.

Once we arrived to the hump i wanted to fish, we started to make bait and it was plenty cooperative and before long we were loaded up with bonito. We slow trolled the baits stopping over top of rocks to let them settle and were rewarded with hard bites from various species of snapper, AJ’s and giant rainbow runners(40 pounders) through the day. The snapper in the photo was the best of the day and we picked up another sail while looking for the marlin that eluded us.

David and Kim from Holland joined us today and though i had forwarned David that the billfishing had been very slow, he stuck to his guns and wouldn’t be persuaded to fish for wahoo, tuna and dorado though that bite was hot. He was determined to catch his first billfish, so i decided to make a long run to find some schools of bonito and do some lilvebait fishing.

We found good bait and right away had plenty and with 5 live bonitos behind the boat we crept around for all of about ten minutes before we hooked up a beauty of a blue marlin that was in the 425 pound class…on a TLD 15!!! Needless to say, we were outmatched on the light tackle, but thanks to some crackerjack boat handling and a cooperative fish, we had the beast leadered 3 hours and 7 miles later.

A short run back to the bait and we were almost immediately rewarded with a double hookup of sailfish. We ended up pulling the hook on one and released the other sailfish. The rods went back in and were quickly hammered by a pair of big jacks, of which one got off and the other was released. Bait was getting tougher to catch and we missed a couple more bites before calling this one a day and heading home with a very, very happy fisherman.