A Costa Rican Daze : Former Southern Californian and Avid Surfer Rick Ruhlow Finds Best of Both Worlds as a Burgeoning Skipper in the Wildly Popular and Productive Fishing Mecca

Rick Ruhlow plied on, rolling over the gentle swells in his little white boat, scanning the horizon for any sign of life.

It was getting late and the sun was setting over the distant hills, the moon emerging.

“The fat lady isn’t singing yet, but she’s humming,” Ruhlow said, a look of frustration showing on his suntanned face. “She’s definitely humming.”

Suddenly, the ocean erupted with life as dolphins, hundreds of them, surfaced in the distance.

That was the sign Ruhlow had sought.

Within a few minutes, he was in the midst of the dolphins, who didn’t seem to mind a bit. They swam in the wake of his boat, performing full twists and half-gainers and flipping and flopping as if crazed.

“But they’re just having fun,” Ruhlow said, letting out a series of trolling feathers.

The dolphins darted and dashed about the boat with reckless abandon, unfazed by the dangerous offering. But then it was not the dolphins Ruhlow was after.

Beneath the intelligent mammals were rather stupid creatures known more for their power and prized for the taste of their flesh. They were tuna, hundreds if not thousands.

They prowled beneath the dolphins, relying upon them to find the baitfish on which they feed.

And they struck hard and fast at what they thought might be small baitfish but instead were Ruhlow’s feathers. As twilight faded to darkness, he and two passengers pumped and reeled until they had loaded the boat with enough 10- to 30-pound tuna to feed a bunch of hungry schoolchildren.

“We’ll drop it off at the school when we get back,” Ruhlow said.

He bid the dolphins adieu and set a course back to Guanamar Harbor.

Ruhlow dropped off the fish at the home of a nearby school teacher, then hurried to his home on the hill, where his wife Jackie awaited.

He was late, but as often happens to the young skipper, he had been caught in the moment.

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Ruhlow, 36, went from being an avid surfer and fisherman in Southern California to an avid surfer and fisherman in this remote little town on the west coast of Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula.

“It’s all he’s ever wanted to do,” said his father, Jerry. “I could never get him to do anything else.”

That is fine for both Ruhlows, considering that Rick, who moved to Costa Rica 10 years ago and got his start here giving tours in the bay, is an up-and-coming skipper in one of the world’s most popular and productive fishing destinations.

Ruhlow, who has been running his narrow 25-footer for a few years, recently acquired a fully equipped 30-foot cruiser, which is scheduled to arrive from Florida in June and will put him in league with some of the more well-known and long-established skippers.

“I get a lot of walk-in business now,” he said. “Most of the bigger boats are pre-booked in the U.S. by people who come down planning on fishing Costa Rica. Me, it’s a guy who comes down here and can’t afford to go and pay $700 for one day. They want to try fishing, but their budget doesn’t allow for the big trips. So they end up going out with me.”

Ruhlow charges about half as much as other skippers, but the price depends on the length of the trip. He books a lot of afternoon half-day trips, which enables him to surf in the morning.

“If I could figure out a way to make a living just surfing, I’d probably do it,” he said. “But I need the cash (from fishing trips) to pay for (his addiction to surfing).”

With his new boat, which will enable him to reach spots that are inaccessible by car, he hopes to combine surfing and fishing trips.

“It’s definitely a fishing boat, but I hope to pre-book in the states some combinations, where people can surf in morning, we can anchor the boat out there and then, ‘boom,’ we’re off and running (to the fishing grounds),” he said. “Or if they want to surf a certain spot in the country, they can charter the boat for a period of a week. I’ll do what it takes to make a buck.”

Anything, he said, except move back to the states.

Ruhlow grew up in the Long Beach area, attending Wilson High, where he played water polo. When he wasn’t in the pool, he was in the ocean, either surfing or fishing.

“His first fishing trip was when he was six months old,” Jerry Ruhlow said. “We heated his (baby) bottle with the exhaust from the outboard motors.”

While in high school he began to work on Southland party boats, first as a “pinhead,” a term applied to those who work basically for free or for tips, then as a deckhand and eventually as a skipper or alternate skipper on overnight boats.

The grind was too much.

“I got tired of long hours, going to work at 9 at night and not getting back until 5 the next evening, and then you had to get ready to go back at 9 again the next night,” he said. “I began to burn out.”

His parents moved to Costa Rica in 1983. Jerry, a former Times reporter, got involved in a variety of business endeavors and fell in love with the country. He lives in a suburb of bustling San Jose.

“Dad talked the place up pretty good in letters and stuff,” Rick Ruhlow said. “So I came down here and stayed for six months. I had 17 bags and my dog.

“I thought I was missing something, though. It was the first time I was really out of the country.”

He moved back to Southern California and worked another season on local boats, then returned to Costa Rica. He left once more, to work with an Australian skipper at the Azores, a group of islands in the North Atlantic off the coast of Portugal.

“That was outrageous, it was a short season but the average fish was like 400 pounds, just incredible, awesome,” he said.

He had had his first taste of “hard-core big-game fishing.”

He returned to Costa Rica intent on making a serious go of it, gaining experience by working for several local skippers before venturing out on his own aboard the little white boat, Apache.

Like everyone else, Ruhlow has had good days and bad days. “My best days was during a tournament,” he said. “We raised (hooked up with) 17 sailfish, and we weren’t even high boat. Some boats were raising 40.”

Aside from tuna and sailfish, black, blue and striped marlin, as well as dorado, regularly make their way aboard the small fleet operating out of the Playa Carrillo area.

“The staple here is rice and beans,” Ruhlow said. “But I also eat a lot of fish.”

*

Indeed, Ruhlow’s eating habits have changed since moving here. There are no fast-food restaurants or large super markets. Life is simple.

But Ruhlow, who recently married a Costa Rican, has no regrets.

Not only does he have no desire to go back to Southern California, he has no desire even to go to San Jose, a small but extremely busy metropolis.

“The first six months was a real trial-and-error period,” he said. “I kept feeling like I was missing stuff: like getting a Sarah Lee (pie) off the shelf, or grabbing some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

“Little things like that, which you take for granted. But then I’d get back there after being down here and I thought, “Why did I go back to states?’ ”

In the Playa Carrillo area, tourism has made only marginal inroads. Ruhlow has no telephone, only a beeper, which he uses to return calls from potential customers.

He has a television, but no cable and no satellite dish with which to connect him to life outside the country. Local programming includes major movies, but they are dubbed in Spanish. Ruhlow has learned to speak and understand Spanish, but some movies just don’t seem the same.

“The other night we checked out ‘Rio Lobo’ with John Wayne,” Ruhlow said. “That was a tough one to watch, listening to John Wayne in Spanish.”

So isolated is Ruhlow from the world he once knew that he relies on his customers to keep up on current events.

“I didn’t know about the O.J. Simpson thing until two months after it happened,” Ruhlow said. “I understand that was the big news. The first two months I had no idea.

“Then I heard (about the Lorena Bobbitt story). I heard about that and go, ‘Wow, life in the United States.’ ”

--For fishing information in Costa Rica call Costa Rica Outdoors at (310) 430-9837 or in Costa Rica at 011-506-282-6743