TARPON SPRINGS : The Stubborn Game Fish Only Part of the Charm of Costa Rican Odyssey

Peace turned to pandemonium the moment the tarpon shot out of the sea, flying through the air in a rage so wild that the sound of the giant lure rattling in its mouth filled the air.

The fishermen scrambled to their feet, only to be knocked out of the way by their guide, Rito Santos, who without warning had reared back and set his hook into the leathery jaw of the beast and was being dragged down the starboard deck.

Santos slammed into the stern rail with both thighs. Line spun from his reel. He reared back again, and again the tarpon flew out of the sea, shaking furiously in an attempt to throw the hook.

Santos held firm, however, giving the fish no slack. His quest to land this region’s most challenging and elusive game fish had taken him four days through 80 miles of jungle river, up narrow tributaries so lush he and his passengers could feel the forest pulsating with life.

Finally, a journey that had begun far up Nicaragua’s San Juan River, was ending, one way or another, in the sparkling Caribbean Sea.

Except Santos was getting nowhere with this silver monster. Those with him could only watch as he struggled to break the stalemate.

They sat on the skiff in a collective daze, realizing that what had begun as a fishing trip had become much more. They gazed back at the steamy world from which they had emerged--one with monkeys in the trees and snakes in the grass, and billions of buzzing insects in between.

A world in which the closest thing to electricity comes from the fireflies twinkling in the night.

A world that time forgot . . .

THE RIVER AND THE RAIN GODDESS

The San Juan River is a swift-flowing waterway fed by Lake Nicaragua in the southwest portion of that country, and by countless tributaries that flow through the jungle. The river is the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and is patrolled by Nicaraguan soldiers and wardens.

Pioneers explored the San Juan and marauding pirates traveled the river to reach the lake and plunder such cities as Granada and Managua. Cornelius Vanderbilt, during the gold rush, took a steamship up the San Juan, hoping to develop a convenient route to the Pacific. More recently, Sandinistas and Contras fought bloody battles on its shores.

These days, the river is used almost exclusively by natives as a means of sustenance and travel via long dug-out canoes.

And, thanks to easing tensions between the countries, by the Rain Goddess.

The brainchild of Alfredo Lopez, a San Jose physician who fell in love with the region years ago, the Rain Goddess is a luxurious, air-conditioned houseboat that his company, Blue Wing International, charters out for fishing trips, nature tours and getaways into an area so rich in wildlife it boggles the mind.

“This is an area with tremendous natural resources,” Lopez said from the deck of the vessel, pointing to the jungle. “We’ve got a huge jungle with a lot of wildlife, a lot of bird life. There are 270 species of birds, and this is one of the few nesting grounds for scarlet macaws, which are becoming very rare.

“Back in the jungle, in the rivers, is the only place I’ve ever seen a harpy eagle, which is almost extinct. It has one of the largest wing spans in the world. You walk in here 100 yards and there are jaguar tracks, ocelots, cougars . . .

“It’s a dangerous jungle, like any jungle. There is prey and there is predator. But basically in the jungle, you’re probably safer than you are crossing a street in downtown Los Angeles.”

Lopez should know. He was born in Costa Rica but went to junior high in downtown L.A. before moving back to his homeland, where he eventually became a doctor.

“I started coming here fishing, and at same time I brought my medical bag, treating people up and down the river,” he said. “They don’t have access to doctors. It’s very hard for them to get a doctor.”

There is one, a shaman who lives upriver a day’s travel into the jungle from the small community of Greytown.

“Narciso is his name,” Lopez said. “And he cures people with herbs, using plants and everything. I tried to teach him about modern medicine, about anatomy, how things work. He tells me about how herbs cure things.

“Say someone has a tumor, an abdominal cancer. He will not understand the general concept. But we talk in regards to symptoms and he describes what he does: ‘I need a combination of three different plants. I have a batch of that growing eight hours into the jungle.’ And people come from all over. They believe in him and I’ve seen him cure some pretty amazing things.

“I’ve also treated the people along the river for several years, freely. I’ve given them medical samples, whatever. The people here are very shy, especially to foreigners. They’re nice and friendly, but shy. They call me shaman and I enjoy that.”

It took several trips to Managua before Lopez received permission to run the Rain Goddess on the San Juan, and the 65-foot vessel--complete with a built-in sewage treatment plant--has been doing so for the last three years.

“What we do is travel the rain forest with a naturalist on board and take side excursions into jungles where the people can really get to feel that they’re in there,” Lopez said. “They get quite a thrill out of it.”

THE JOURNEY

The two small groups accompanying Lopez and his cast of characters on a trip in March, when the tarpon migrate upriver to spawn and mate, did so with the hopes of doing battle against this region’s most challenging and elusive game fish.

They departed bustling San Jose by van, traveled over misty mountains and through dripping forests before reaching Puerto Viejo, a small town that through history has served as a port for goods shipped to and from the Caribbean.

From there they stepped down a rickety flight of stairs and onto long, narrow river boats, then floated precariously down the Rio Sarapiqui, a narrow waterway, into total wilderness.

Green iguanas were perched on almost every branch. Crocodiles and caimans, their larger relatives, sunned themselves on the banks. Strange birds with fluffy heads and twig-like legs walked like robots through the shallows.

Eventually, the river spilled into the San Juan, an impressively wide, fast river. The Rain Goddess, white with pastel purples and blues, provided a stark contrast to the jungle surroundings.

Clifford Palmer, the vessel’s chef, greeted the passengers with a huge smile, and they responded in kind after walking through the sliding glass door and discovering a dining room befitting a mansion, with a table covered with white linen and fine china. Each of the six staterooms had a sink with running water and a window with a view of the jungle.

Lopez took one of the skiffs to the small outpost on the Nicaragua side of the river and received an entirely different greeting.

Three soldiers, wearing shabby uniforms with Sandinista patches on the sleeves, clutched machine guns and did not crack so much as a smile. A small dog emerged from beneath the hut and barred its teeth. A large pig and several piglets wandered out too.

Lopez eventually obtained clearance and headed back to the Rain Goddess.

TIGHT-LIPPED TARPON

The passengers wasted no time boarding two of a small fleet of skiffs and johnboats. Those with Santos and Peter Gorinsky, a renowned South and Central American guide, were the first to head upstream.

The first stop, at a narrow portion of river where tarpon had to pass, produced several sightings, but no hookups. It didn’t matter at this point. The sense of adventure was excitement enough.

On the Costa Rica side of the river, large patches of jungle had been cleared for cattle. Women and small children stood knee-deep in the river, doing laundry. The women kept their heads down, the children smiled and waved.

On the Nicaragua side there was nothing but impenetrable rain forest.

“One of the benefits of war,” Gorinsky said, between puffs on his pipe. The country was too poor, too preoccupied to embark on any jungle-clearing endeavors, he said.

Birds of all kinds and colors darted about and monkeys howled in the distance.

Hours passed before frustration began to show on the anglers’ faces. Plenty of tarpon, but no takers. Gorinsky seemed as perplexed as anyone, but said such is sometimes the case with this unpredictable sport fish.

“Once we were fishing and everybody was talking about how they wanted to die,” he said. “One guy said he would want to be shot by a jealous husband and [others mentioned] a few other ways. Then this other guy says, ‘All I want to do is catch a good tarpon. Then I can die.’

“And he did. He ‘jumped’ a tarpon, landed it, then died of a heart attack. It was not just the size of the fish. It was the size plus the fact that the fish fought so well. He really fought the fish. He gave the fish hell; it was a glorious battle. It was just beautiful, the whole thing. The tarpon was released. [The man who died] was young, 46. His son was happy, though. He inherited everything.”

Nobody died fighting fish on Day 1. All anyone caught were snook and guapote (rainbow bass) at the start, where the tributaries spilled into the river. Not bad fighters in their own right, but nothing compared to tarpon, which grow to more than 200 pounds.

Back at the houseboat, it was learned that Lopez had boated a tarpon. He found a dead one floating in the river--possibly one speared and unrecovered by locals--and gave it to a family on the river while making his customary house calls. The family responded by giving Lopez a huge batch of succulent river shrimp, langostinos, which became a staple at Palmer’s dinner table.

As dusk turned to night, the jungle seemed to come alive. Yet despite the buzzing and clicking of insects and frogs, the howling of the monkeys, the gurgling of the river, a strange peace fell over the region.

Sleep came easily.

Day 2: A quick breakfast and an early start, a trip farther upriver, to the outpost at Boca San Carlos. Santos asked the soldiers, including one young man with a scar from a bullet he says he took in his belly during the war, about the stubborn tarpon. They smiled and showed him a few fish they had caught earlier in the day.

More lures were cast, to no avail, until Santos jumped a tarpon that charged out of the murky river not 20 feet from the boat. But in an instant it shook its massive head and Santos’ lure came flying back to the boat. He reeled it in with disgust. Dozens of tarpon then began to roll on the surface, as if to tease the frustrated anglers.

The rising moon, nearly full, led Gorinsky to believe that the tarpon were probably feeding at night and not hungry during the day. As good an excuse as any, everyone thought.

Day 3: An early morning visit by game wardens, including Alfonso Su Olivas, the chief warden for the Indio Maize National Wildlife Refuge, which includes a vast portion of Nicaraguan rain forest.

Olivas and two others--each carrying an automatic rifle with a banana clip--startled the group at first, but were pleasant enough.

“Poachers are a problem,” Olivas said, explaining his visit. “Most are Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans living on the border who are just looking for something to eat. But we have to do our job.”

Olivas chose not to search the Rain Goddess, but said he and his partners had just pursued six major poachers deep into the jungle.

“We couldn’t catch them,” he added. “But we did manage to confiscate their boat and motor.”

There was also a late-afternoon trip by johnboat up a narrow tributary Santos hoped would lead to hungry tarpon.

To the others, it seemed to lead to the very heart of the jungle. They brushed vines and branches from their faces and peered into the forest, hoping to see the jaguars and sloths Lopez spoke of. And hoping that the dreaded bushmaster, the jungle’s deadliest snake, wouldn’t drop out of the trees and sink its fangs into their flesh.

“That’s exactly what it is, the master of the bush,” Gorinsky had told them. “They’ll be out at night, in the daytime. They are the only snake that will actually hunt you down. He will actually follow you and drop you to attract rodents and mice so he’ll have a good supply of food for some time.”

(It was later learned that bushmasters, although large and deadly, can survive for nearly a month on a single rodent, and that they spend most of their time coiled on the jungle floor.)

Finally, the johnboat punched through one last section of tributary and there, before the anglers’ eyes, was a breathtaking lake more than a mile long and twice as wide, completely deserted and unfished by anyone but a few of the locals. Santos pointed to tarpon swimming just beneath the surface.

These tarpon, however, proved just as stubborn as those in the river. But the snook and the guapote were plentiful and hungry, inhaling anything resembling a bass lure. The anglers fished well into the darkness, trolling and casting along the lake’s dark shores.

Lopez aimed a flashlight at a muddy bank, revealing what seemed demons of the jungle: crocodiles, visible only by their eyes, which glowed red when caught by the beams of light.

The flesh-eating reptiles were on everyone’s mind on the ride back to the Rain Goddess, especially when the anglers had to get out and push each time the boat got stuck on a sandbar.

Day 4: The Rain Goddess had moved downriver and was anchored at the junction of the San Juan and the Rio Colorado, which runs through northeastern Costa Rica briefly before spilling into the Caribbean. That’s where Santos ended up in his skiff, with dozens of others from the lodges at the mouth of the Colorado, chasing massive schools of voracious tarpon, which were churning up enormous patches of sea in their vicious pursuit of baitfish.

Commercial fishermen hauled them over the rail by the dozens, despite the tarpon’s protected status as a “sport only” species that must be released. Anglers in the lodge boats were busy as well, experiencing double and even triple hookups.

Such wasn’t the case on Santos’ boat, where the anglers had drifted off to sleep before Santos, without uttering a word, dipped his rod tip forward and reared back, putting an abrupt end to the tranquillity.

Santos finally subdued the tarpon, an estimated 130-pounder, after about a 40-minute fight. He held up the fish with both hands, smiled triumphantly, then unhooked the weary fish and watched it slowly disappear into the wavering depths.

Five-day trips aboard the Rain Goddess (three full days on the boat and one night in a San Jose hotel) cost $1,620 a person, including meals, transportation and gear. Seven-day trips cost $2,100. For details, call (800) 308-3394 in the U.S. or 011-506-282-6743 or 011-506-231-4299 in Costa Rica.