COSTA RICA : Where a Jungle River Empties Into the Caribbean, Tarpon and Snook Provide Fishing Tales to Remember

An alligator, sunning itself on a mud bar, became alarmed by the commotion on the jungle river and skittered into the water. Behind the green curtain of trees and vines at the big brown river’s edge, tropical birds squawked.

On a big jungle river in a little country, Costa Rica, a strong man and a big fish were locked in combat.

Joe Hudson, a Houston fly fisherman, was standing in the bow of a skiff, straining to hold his bent fly rod steady against a big tarpon he had fooled with a red-headed white streamer fly.

Hudson, his fishing partner and their guide were being pulled downriver by the tarpon. Hudson was using light tackle and seemed to be making little progress with his fish when a reporter and photographer, in another boat, came upon them.

“This has been going on for 30 minutes,” Hudson’s friend shouted.

It was 90 degrees and humid. It looked like the onset of a long, hot struggle.

As they drifted past other anchored skiffs from three nearby fishing lodges, fishermen shouted encouragement to Hudson. But the tarpon was big and strong and Hudson didn’t have strong enough tackle. Occasionally, the tarpon leaped free of the surface, shuddered in mid-air, trying to shed the bright red-white fly, and crashed back to the river. The splash could have been caused by an anvil hitting the water from a great height.

“Ah, it is a big tarpon, over 100 pounds,” said Wendell Hodgson, a guide.

From behind the green curtain that was the start of the jungle at the river’s edge, a noisy screeching was heard.

“That is a howler monkey,” Hodgson said. “Maybe he is laughing because he knows the fish is too big for this fisherman.”

The battle continued. Hudson’s boat had drifted and been pulled about two miles from where he had first tied into the tarpon. The fish had stopped jumping, but occasionally rolled on the surface. It appeared to be between four and five feet long.

Tarpon aren’t sprinters. They’re stand-up sluggers. This one was never more than 50 feet from Hudson’s skiff. But the fisherman couldn’t bring it to within gaff distance.

At the 90-minute mark, Hudson’s friend, seated patiently in the back of the skiff, said: “Joe, it’s time to fish or cut bait with this fish . . . otherwise, I won’t get to fish today.”

Perspiration had drenched Hudson. He strained to bring the still-rolling tarpon close enough for his guide to gaff. He brought the big fish to within four feet of the stern. The guide took a whack at it with the long-handled gaff. The fish, spooked, moved quickly to Hudson’s left. His line, stretched and weakened by the long fight, brushed the side of the boat and parted.

Hudson dropped his rod, drooped his shoulders and stared skyward. He’d lost. But he clapped his hands together sharply, and said: “Oh well, let’s go get another one!”

Said Hodgson: “Very excellent fish, the tarpon.”

In Costa Rica, about a dozen major rivers flow off the eastern slopes of the country’s spine, the Cordillera Central, and flow to the east, eventually emptying into the Caribbean.

On the Caribbean coast, the northernmost river is the Rio Colorado, which flows through Nicaraguan and Costa Rican jungles before emptying into the Caribbean, about 15 miles below the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border. Within a few miles of the mouth are three fishing resorts, offering superb tarpon and snook fishing, the Rio Colorado Lodge, Casa Mar and Isla de Pesca.

Fishermen, most of them from the southeastern United States and Texas, journey annually to the river. An increasing number are coming from California to experience a pair of piscatorial species more familiar to Florida fishermen: tarpon and snook.

In San Jose, the country’s capital, after an overnight stay at a hotel, anglers are flown in twin-engine planes early in the morning to the lodges of Rio Colorado.

It’s a 30-minute flight that begins by taking passengers over the saddle formed by two active volcanoes framing San Jose. Costa Rica is small, about the size of West Virginia, and 10 minutes after takeoff at San Jose--roughly in the middle of the country--you can see the Caribbean. After passing between the volcanoes, the plane is over immense banana plantations on the Caribbean plains.

Within sight of the coast, jungle terrain begins and you can see sections of the Rio Colorado, as wide in parts as any river in America.

The pilot swoops down, flies a few hundred feet above the river, and points. Below, on the right shore, is the Rio Colorado Lodge, built on stilts for protection from seasonal floods.

Touchdown is on a lumpy asphalt strip half a mile away, near the beach. Greeting visitors, as they step off the plane, is Hodgson.

“Hello, I’m Wendell,” he says, cheerily, in the British accent his parents brought with them from Jamaica decades ago. “I will be your guide while you are here. I will see to it you catch fish.”

Luggage is loaded into a skiff, the passengers climb in, and Wendell starts the 40-horsepower outboard motor for the two-minute ride to the lodge.

A five-day jungle adventure is under way.

Day 1--At dawn, Yvonne, the lodge cook, rings the dinner bell. A dozen or so fishermen sit down at the upstairs dining room for a breakfast of fried eggs, strong coffee, bread, fried bananas, Tang, fresh papaya and pineapple, and the national staple, black beans and rice.

Out front, at the dock, guides prepare the skiffs as the sun rises from the Caribbean to greet a clear sky.

Hodgson takes the writer and photographer up river. Later in the day, he says, we will fish the mouth of the river. The lodge is located on the south shore of the Rio Colorado, which splits the town of Colorado in two, Colorado North and Colorado South. The population numbers about 800, and first-time visitors are struck first by the heavy river traffic in canoes carved out of logs.

Much of Costa Rica’s east coast was populated centuries ago by English-speaking blacks from Jamaica. Canoe building was a widely used skill.

Says Hodgson: “The river is our highway, our artery. There are no cars here because there are no roads. That man over there (he points to a man paddling slowly downriver on the other side of the river) is carrying wild cane he’s cut, probably for decorative work on his wall or ceiling. People also carry bananas, vegetables, corn, coconuts or rice on the river. They sell fresh fruit or pork to the fishing resorts, and carry firewood to their homes.”

The only sign on the river that there is unrest in Central America is a police station. Costa Rica, a relatively prosperous democracy for more than a century, has no standing army, only a state police force. Here, a half-dozen young men in green fatigues sit lazily under a grass-thatched structure, with one .60 caliber machine gun mounted on a forked wooden stake nearby.

For a T-shirt or a U.S. baseball cap, the young policemen guarding the river allow fishermen to pose for pictures with them--and the machine gun.

Hodgson stops the boat near an old man along the river. He is cutting wild cane with a machete and digging with a shovel. He holds up a two-foot root that looks like a giant carrot.

“We call that a yuca ,” Hodgson says. “If you boil it, and chop it up, it adds a spicy taste when you eat it with fish.”

He passes a family living beneath two trees bearing strange-looking fruit--grapefruit-size and bright green with sharp spines.

“They are castanas ,” Hodgson says. “Inside are very big seeds. After they are boiled, they taste like peanuts.”

Next, a surprising sight. A man stands in his canoe, 10 feet from shore, a baseball bat poised over his head. A small animal is swimming toward the canoe, chased by two dogs.

The man clubs the animal, reaches down and picks up the small pig-like creature by the hind feet, then whacks it a couple of times on the head. The dogs scramble into the canoe, mission completed.

“That’s a paca, “ Hodgson says. “It is very good eating. They use dogs to find them in the jungle, then to chase them into the water.”

Further upriver, several boats from Rio Colorado and Casa Mar are anchored. It’s a productive tarpon area, and fishermen are using lures such as green Bombers, Scampis, and magnum Rapallas. Several other anglers are standing up with long fly rods and flicking red-white fly patterns across the water, letting them sink briefly, then casting again.

One of the spin fishermen is 18-year-old Mike Malina of Aurora, Ill. His high school graduation present is a week’s stay at Rio Colorado Lodge. He’s sitting in his skiff with his father when a big tarpon slams into his big Rapalla, bowing his spinning rod. Almost instantly, the big fish leaps and sends a water spray toward Malina’s boat.

His guide unties the anchor line and they drift downstream. Malina is fishing with 12-pound test line, a bit light. Hodgson says his tarpon appears to be in the 80-pound class. It leaps high out of the water again, shakes violently, and crashes back. Drifting downstream, Malina gains a little, then loses a little to the fish. The battle continues for 20 minutes. Suddenly, Malina’s line makes a sharp turn to the right. The tarpon is heading straight for a half-submerged tree. Malina, afraid to put too much tension on his light line, can’t keep him from the tree. The tarpon goes behind the tree and the line snaps as it touches the tree.

Hodgson smiles. He’s seen this act before.

“You see, the tarpon know the river,” he says, with a wisdom stretching beyond his 27 years. “The tarpon know the tree is there. Very excellent fish, the tarpon.”

Day 2--All 14 Rio Colorado Lodge skiffs are at the mouth of the river, 10 minutes from the lodge, futilely waiting for tarpon strikes. On calm days, about 20% of the time, the surf is low enough for the skiffs to go outside, for what is normally more productive tarpon fishing.

But today, the surf is too high, and the boats are at anchor, letting the river current pull the lures toward the churning ocean. It is a frustrating morning. For the first 90 minutes, there isn’t a strike, although numerous tarpon can be seen rolling in the water, near the boats.

Outside, white birds swarm and dive on the frothy ocean, an indication that fishing would be better where only birds can go.

Hodgson tries to fill the lull by correcting false reports of tarpon cuisine.

“Many Americans come here and are surprised to learn tarpon taste good,” he said. “Americans think tarpon isn’t good to eat because it has too many bones. But we prepare a tarpon with a spoon, pulling the meat away from the bones. We cook it in small pieces, with rice and onions. It is very good.”

Hodgson pulls anchor and travels upstream, saying we’ll return to the mouth later in the day. On the way, his guests are surprised to see several porpoise, nearly 10 miles upriver.

“Porpoise look for snook,” Hodgson says. “They love snook. They kill snook with their mouth, mash their head around in their mouths, and suck the blood out of the snook.”

The fishing upriver is as slow as it was at the mouth. After stopping at the lodge for lunch, Hodgson returns to the river mouth. As he drops anchor, a fly fisherman from Casa Mar hooks into a 70-pound tarpon. An expert angler, he has the big fish to the bow in 15 minutes and his guide releases the fish, unharmed.

A few other strikes are made and tarpon explode off the surface of the river, but most quickly throw the lures back at the disappointed fishermen. At 5 p.m., it’s time for the Rio Colorado skiffs to return to the lodge.

A fixture at Rio Colorado Lodge is Ken Cameron, almost a character out of a Hemingway novel. He’s 70, lean as a rail, wears only sandals, shorts, T-shirts and a rubber band to hold his gray pony tail together. When the boats come in, Cameron is always in his favorite rocking chair on the porch, his head buried in one of the couple of paperback novels he reads every day.

Cameron has been at Rio Colorado Lodge for about 12 years, since he and owner Archie Fields built the place.

He gazes out at the lengthening shadows on the wide river, toward the last glow of evening green, on the jungle’s edge across the river.

“I love this place because it has no future,” he says. “Tourism-wise, the only reason anyone would want to come here is to fish for tarpon and snook. We do get a lot of naturalists who come down to count birds or ferns, or whatever it is those people do. We have beaches right around the corner, but they’re useless. They’re dangerous. The currents are too strong for swimming and there are lots of big sharks.

“You know, the wildlife in the jungle here never ceases to amaze me. We have a species of frog here the size of your thumbnail. It has gorgeous colors, but it’s poisonous to the touch. Isn’t that amazing?”

And with that, Cameron abruptly goes back to his novel, a tattered, 20-year-old Graham Greene paperback.

Cameron is the lodge crank. Rio Colorado Lodge is built around a menagerie of caged Costa Rican wildlife--ocelots, monkeys, toucans, macaws and other tropical birds.

The first of the two ocelots--medium size spotted wildcats--arrived six years ago.

“One of the locals raised chickens for us,” Cameron explains. “Something was killing one of his chickens every night. He stayed in the coop with his shotgun one night, and shot an ocelot. But it turned out to be a mother.

“He looked around and found a kitten. He gave it to his daughter, but she brought it over here, with a piece of string as a collar. I bought it from her, and we just let it have the freedom of the lodge, like one of our regular house cats.

“That worked for about a year. Then a fisherman was standing under the stairs to the dining room taking its picture one day. In an instant, the ocelot was on top of the guy’s head and with one swipe of its paw, opened up his face.

“That was the end of that. The cat went in this cage that day and he’s been in there ever since, six years. The second cat someone just gave us.

“But Archie, doggone him, took the claws out of both cats’ feet. He knew I didn’t want him to do that, so he waited until I was in San Jose when he had it done by a vet. Doggone him, it’s burned me up ever since. Can you imagine anyone having the claws removed from a cat?”

Yvonne rings the dinner bell. This night, a special jungle treat: iguana, served as a side dish with someone’s snook as the main course. The iguana has been baked in onions, garlic and a tomato-meat sauce. The flesh is snowy white and tastes like chicken, with many small bones.

During dinner, Cameron is still worked up over the ocelots’ having been declawed.

“You know, one year we had a naturalist here who said they were margays, not ocelots. But he couldn’t tell me what the difference is. And of all the naturalists we’ve had here since, not one has been able to tell me the difference between an ocelot and a margay.”

Day 3--Ominous dawn. A big, black thunderhead over the Caribbean conceals the sunrise. Relatively slow fishing has been bad enough, but a storm on the way, too? Gloom descends. Rain gear is packed after breakfast, and fishermen head for their skiffs.

But 30 minutes later, it’s apparent that the storm will remain at sea, and blow toward Nicaragua. New hope arises.

At 6:36, a Swiss banker, Dieter Nassenstein, hooks a big tarpon with a red-white fly. The fish makes several spectacular jumps, sending sprays of water in every direction. But Nassenstein’s stainless steel hook has completely penetrated the tarpon’s bony lip. This one won’t get away.

He brings the tarpon to the bow in 30 minutes. It’s gaffed and brought aboard. Several hours later, at the lodge, it is weighed and found to be exactly 80 pounds.

After Nassenstein has his fish in the boat, there are three more tarpon strikes at the river mouth, but all are lost. Then doldrums set in again. There are no strikes and we return to the lodge for lunch.

At lunch, George Malina, Mike’s father, has a sad tale. He’d been fishing upriver, and tied into a 100-pound-plus tarpon, and lost it.

“It was a red-and-white magnum Rapalla and he straightened all the hooks out,” he says.

Jokes another fisherman: “You must not have bowed to the king.”

“You’re right,” Malina says.

Bowing to the king is a catch phrase at Rio Colorado Lodge. At the front of the lodge, a wide wooden sign declares: “While in residence at this lodge, remember . . . BOW TO THE KING!”

Bowing to the king means dipping your rod tip to a tarpon when he leaps from the water after being hooked. When catching other species, fishermen are taught to pull on the rod, to keep tension on the line and also to drive the hook more deeply into the fish’s mouth, not giving a hooked fish enough slack line with which to maneuver the hook from its mouth.

But pulling a line sharply on a 100-pound tarpon usually has one result: The lure is yanked from the tarpon’s hard, bony mouth and flies right back at the fisherman.

Says Jerry Ruhlow, an assistant manager at Rio Colorado Lodge: “The tarpon is probably the hardest fish there is to get to the boat. With every other fish, you’re taught, even as a little kid, to keep that line tight. But you’ve got to do the reverse on a tarpon strike, and no matter how many times you tell someone that, they’ll yank on that rod when the tarpon jumps and lose him.

“If you can get 1 out of 10 hooked tarpon to the boat, you’re doing a good job. It’s also critical to have extra sharp hooks, because tarpon have such hard mouths.”

Earlier in the week, a fisherman had showed up with two-pound-test line, hoping, he said, to try for a world record with the ultra-light line. Ruhlow sneered.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “If you hook up a big tarpon at the river mouth on two-pound, and he turns left, you’d better be sure you have a Nicaraguan visa with you.”

After lunch, the fishermen return to their skiffs and guides. But the afternoon is even less productive than the morning’s fishing. The ocean stays rough, keeping the fishermen at the mouth, where only a couple of tarpon hits highlight the afternoon.

Day 4--Wendell wants to try an extra early start at the river mouth, figuring tarpon may be in an early feeding mode. At 5:15, he starts the outboard, leaves the dock and is lowering the anchor at the mouth at 5:30.

There is a beautiful, orange sunrise and the day’s first glow reveals a sight to lift the spirits of any luckless fishermen. Tarpon, dozens of them, gently roll on the surface of the water over an area covering several acres.

But the tarpon are uninterested in a variety of lures Hodgson’s fishermen show them. After a couple of hours, Hodgson says: “I think we should try to catch snook now. Let’s go to Samay Bay.”

After lunch at the lodge, Hodgson takes his two fishermen on a jungle trip to the region’s best snook fishing. About four miles upriver, he turns the skiff left into a canal, where some of the high trees lean nearly across the 50-foot-wide canal.

Across the canal, Hodgson sees tree limbs being vigorously shaken. He slows the outboard and turns the skiff around.

“Look, these are white-faced monkeys,” he says, pointing to where two adult monkeys and a juvenile scampered about a tree’s high limbs, clearly nervous about being watched.

Another mile and Hodgson stops the skiff again. He points skyward, to the thin limbs of a tree on the edge of Samay Bay. A hairy creature sits alone on a limb, as still as a statue.

“It’s a three-toed sloth,” Hodgson said. “When we go back, you will see that he will still be there.”

Samay Bay is a channel created by a log-strewn sandy peninsula. From the channel, Caribbean surf can be heard on the other side of the peninsula. There is a heavy growth of palms on the west side of the channel, behind which someone has cleared land. “They’re going to build a coconut plantation there,” Hodgson says.

The guide ties on a gray Scampi lure to the photographer’s line. Hodgson begins a slow troll pattern, about 15 feet from the palms. In 15 minutes, the photographer’s rod is suddenly in a deep bend.

While the photographer battles his fish, two other Rio Colorado Lodge skiffs troll by, and their occupants shout encouragement. In fact, while the battle is under way, another fisherman on another skiff is hooked up, too.

In 10 minutes, the photographer brings a 12 1/2-pound snook to the gaff. Brought out of the water, it shows a beautiful lime green color in the late afternoon sun, with the distinctive shiny black line running the length of its body.

“I am very good at catching snook,” Wendell says.

“Other guides, I think, go a little too fast. I think their motors scare the snook. I troll much slower here. Very excellent fish, the snook.”

Thirty minutes later, another snook assaults a gray Scampi, and the writer’s rod is bent nearly in half. This fish, too, is brought to gaff, and weighs 17 pounds.

With two snook in the boat, Hodgson starts the skiff for the 40-minute run back to the lodge. As the boat roars out of the channel, its passengers look again to the top of the tree.

The three-toed sloth hasn’t moved.

Day 5--Stormy dawn. On the gray horizon, rain is falling on the Caribbean. The boats are all at the mouth early, hoping for some lively fishing action before rough weather moves in.

Rudy Dodero, manager of Rio Colorado Lodge, and a former national Costa Rica fly fishing champion, is standing in his skiff at the mouth of the river, casting a red-white fly. Suddenly, a strike. There is a sudden leap, about 15 yards from the bow, as a tarpon in the 100-pound class leaps from the water. The big fish flails in midair, sending a spiraling spray of water into the soft morning light.

Dodero battles the fish with his long fly rod. The tarpon makes six more leaps near the boat, then makes an unusually long run for a tarpon, about 50 yards. It makes one more shuddering leap, then crashes to the water. The line becomes slack, and once again a big Rio Colorado tarpon has TKO’d a fisherman.

Says Hodgson: “Very excellent fish, the tarpon.”

Just as Dodero loses his tarpon, sunlight breaks through the gray clouds on the horizon. The storm that a few minutes ago seemed so close at hand, is breaking apart.

In an hour, the Caribbean is calm. For the first time all week, most of the boats venture out past the flat surf to where more tarpon, everyone hopes, will be feeding as aggressively as the one that attacked Dodero’s fly.

Instead, many fishermen quickly encounter tough, powerful gamesters, but they aren’t tarpon. Thousands of jack crevalle are moving about, with tarpon, beating the tarpon to the fishermen’s lures and flies. Crevalle are jack family members, along with roosterfish and amberjack, and although they aren’t considered good table fare, they are superb fighters, among the best, pound for pound, in the sea.

These are in the 8- to 10-pound class, and create an hour or so of brisk top-water action for about 20 fishermen. A few tarpon are hooked, but for the most part, it is a jack crevalle circus.

While that is happening, 9-year-old Lowell Kahn of Miami is trolling with his father in Samay Bay. A 21-pound snook hits his big Bomber lure and Lowell soon has a trophy in the boat.

Later, over dinner that evening at the lodge, Ruhlow talks about an exciting fishing expeditions to come.

“We’re building a 24-foot dory boat that will get us outside the mouth here, and we’re going to do some real serious trolling out there,” he says.

“The locals who commercial-fish outside occasionally come back with very big tuna and also tell us of seeing a lot of big jumping fish out there, which I assume are marlin. The river mouth is too shallow for conventional sportfishers to get out, so we decided to build a flat-bottom dory.

“The waters outside the mouth are totally unexplored, totally unexploited, by sport fishermen. The nearest port of any kind to us is Limon, 70 miles to the south.”

Conversation turns to the snook bite, which seemed good in Samay Bay.

Says Ruhlow: “People in Florida feel about snook the way fishermen in Southern California feel about white sea bass--they’re getting scarce. There’s a school of thought that the best time to fish for them is from the beach right here at the mouth, in a hard rain.

“We have a guy who comes down here every July, hoping for big summer storms while he’s here. Standing on that beach at Samay one day last July, he caught two, 35 and 37 pounds--enormous snook.”

At the end of the table, Ken Cameron has stopped grousing about the ocelots’ claws long enough to add: “See, that’s what I love about this place--there’s nothing to do but catch big fish here!”