The River Wild

Twas a midsummer night before Christmas and all through the . . .

Whoa, it has been a long time since my visit to this remote, jungle hamlet in northeast Costa Rica--and since my brief stay at Rio Colorado Lodge, one of the most charming resorts in a country full of them.

I’ve waited so long to write about it, I suppose, because the rainy season had set in by the time I got here and the hotel had no guests. Not a creature was stirring. Not even the resident tapir, the monkeys or macaws, parrots or parakeets, as far as I could tell.

By day, however, thousands of tarpon were going totally wild in the Caribbean, churning up the surface during one ferocious feeding foray.

With tarpon, you “bow to the king” soon after each hookup, meaning that when a thick-skinned tarpon goes airborne, you dip the rod forward instead of backward, lest the lure shake free and come flying back in your face.

I felt like bowing out of simple admiration for such valiant warriors, wearing such shiny armor.

But the presence of so many wonderful game fish notwithstanding, with no input from anyone other than Dan Wise, the resort’s owner, and a few of his helpers, I chose against writing the standard, “There I was, locked in battle with a mighty tarpon” story so many others already have written.

Instead, I made a mental note to produce some sort of column, at some point, on the area in general and its most famous resort, a creaky wooden lodge built on stilts where this country’s version of the Colorado River meets the Caribbean Sea.

Now, here it is the day before Christmas, and that time has come. The lodge is drying out after a long period of rain, which has washed all sorts of snakes onto the premises, bringing comfort and joy to no one. After a brief fall run of calba snook, the lodge is experiencing another lull in angler traffic. But all that is about to change as the dry season is at hand, and with it comes the seasonal invasion of thousands of tarpon into the rivers and lagoons to spawn, bringing a good deal of joy to this part of the world.

Though there are now about half a dozen resorts catering to rod-toting thrill-seekers, including the upscale Silver King Lodge (with a pool and Jacuzzi!), the tarpon to beat remains a 207-pound monster caught several years ago aboard a Rio Colorado Lodge vessel. (This is the subject of debate, however, as an outfit well up-river in the Cano Negro area earlier this year claimed to have weighed a 220-pounder but reportedly did so without a certified scale.)

The success rate for getting one of these surface-to-air missiles hasn’t changed--it remains about 10%. One thing that has changed is that the lagoons are no longer producing as they once did, what with more locals putting outboards on their dugout canoes and spooking the fish.

The best fishing remains in the sea, if and when it’s calm enough to get beyond the ever-tricky and occasionally deadly river mouth, where shifting sand bars and swift currents often act as a daunting barrier.

But the bigger tarpon are caught in the river, anyway, along with some pretty big snook. A 44-pounder was caught during my visit by a local fisherman using a hand line. He sold it to Wise, whose chef turned it into deliciously sauteed, lightly breaded fillets.

Coming from the Deep South, Wise is big on hospitality, which is a good trait for a hotelier. And Southerners will be happy to know that grits are available at breakfast.

A renowned Mississippi trial attorney, Wise is in agreement with those who say the place isn’t quite the same without its previous owner, Archie Fields, who died of cancer and was buried on Good Friday in 1993. Fields was larger than life around here, which made his passing all the sadder.

He was a close friend of Wise’s, though, and the balding lawyer, his trained attack dog--a stately Belgian Malinois--always close by, has done an excellent job of maintaining the standards set by Fields, adding only necessary upgrades, such as air-conditioning in some rooms and a central phone and fax for clients who feel they need them. At the same time, he has been careful not to upset the funky charm that made Rio Colorado Lodge famous.

Still here is the menagerie of wild animals in cages along the wooden walkways--several species of monkeys, blue and scarlet macaws, toucans and, of course, the tapir, an easy-going ungulate who recently escaped, I’m told, much to the dismay of his keepers.

Many of the animals were brought here wounded and rehabilitated, to some extent, and seem to have adjusted well enough to captivity. Anyone who has stayed here can attest to the fact that they enjoy the company of humans.

And, yes, as was the case when Fields was alive, all rum drinks are on the house during happy hour, a tradition presumably having to do with the heavy Jamaican influence in the area.

“That Archie was able to keep this place going still amazes me,” Wise says of Fields, who opened with two rooms and two small skiffs in 1972. “Now Costa Rica is a hot destination, but he was having to sell the country as well as the fishing. Hell, he had to convince [clients] to come between warring countries. My hat’s off to him running this place with all the bodies floating down the river.

“I mean, I’ve heard stories about Nicaraguan gun boats shooting behind their boats while they were out there fishing. To keep this place going during those times was no small thing. It got so tough at times that Archie had to go home and sell insurance for a year to keep it going.”

The history of this region certainly adds to its charm. The Rio Colorado joins with the San Juan River less than 10 miles west of here. The San Juan serves as the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border. Pioneers explored the San Juan extensively, and marauding pirates followed the river all the way to Lake Nicaragua to plunder such cites as Granada and Managua.

More recently, Contras and Sandinistas fought bloody battles on the river’s shores.

These days, thankfully, the battles are mostly between man and fish, which can be pretty fierce in their own right if that fish is a large tarpon.

Santa Monica’s Bill Beebe, years ago, hooked a 90-pounder that jumped “higher than my head” and landed in the small boat he was fishing from, sending the guide scrambling onto the outboard and creating a good deal of chaos for several minutes before flopping its way back into the water.

Beebe managed to save his three cameras, but the fish sent two expensive rods and reels into the river before making its escape.

More recently, a guide aboard the Rain Goddess, a luxury houseboat that runs river tours on a seasonal basis, told me a story about a client who said that he wouldn’t be able to die happy until he caught a large tarpon. On the same trip, he “jumped” a large tarpon, as they say, and eventually landed the beast. He then suffered a fatal heart attack.

“The man who died was young, only 46,” the guide said. “His son was happy, though. He inherited everything.”

Tarpon indeed make a wild river all the wilder, as do the bull sharks that patrol its depths and the crocodiles that bask on its muddy banks. But Mother Nature chips in from time to time as well, spinning hurricanes this way.

A few years ago, Wise says, forecasters called for a direct hit on the river not long after he took over.

“So I got in touch with the local mayor and said we need to have an evacuation plan,” he recalls. “They all told me that everyone has been here since 1870 with no real problems, and ‘He’s a gringo and full of [nonsense].’

“They did nothing and I went ahead and made my plan and got all the boats gassed up. I got ice, made sandwiches, called the [employees] in and said, ‘If I send for you all tonight you can bring your immediate family and we’ll all go up the river. . . .’

“We had 28 guests and I made the decision that afternoon that there wasn’t any need to ruin everybody’s day. Everybody had their supper and they went to bed, and I went to bed. I was sleeping so hard that when the night watchman came and beat on my door at 2 a.m. and yelled, ‘She’s coming! She’s coming!’ I yelled back, ‘Who’s coming? Where am I?’

“So, I finally realized what was going on and started waking the guests up, telling them, ‘We’re going to have to leave the hotel. Get dressed, get your wallets and passports and money.’

“Well, the village people, who didn’t want to help earlier, started coming down to the river. It was like Noah’s Ark. We got on the [tour boat, Colorado] Queen, two by two. I had a crippled old lady, kids with parrots on their shoulders. . . . I ended up opening my gas pumps so they could fill their little canoes and get the hell out of there.

“We’re finally making our way up river, in the driving rain and it’s getting rough, and these two Florida guys [guests], who looked like Grizzly Adams and were never very friendly, started complaining about how we could have put them in such a dangerous situation. They were cussing and raising all sorts of hell, scaring everyone.

“Finally, we hit the beach up the river north of Greytown [in Nicaragua]. We’re in a pretty good shelter, eating tuna sandwiches, drinking screwdrivers. We were living high! And then suddenly, in the middle of the rain, these guys apologized for their behavior, and this big grizzly-looking guy stands up and says to everyone, ‘You know, it’s times like these that we should all get closer to the Lord.’

“Well, we had this little lady from Mississippi along and she gets all excited, and is about to set up this prayer meeting when this guy reaches into a bag and pulls out, not a Bible, but a half-gallon of Lord Calvert [whiskey]. I kid you not, that was the Lord!”

But not necessarily the gospel.

For information on Rio Colorado Lodge, call (800) 243-9777. For information on other lodges in the area, or on Costa Rica tourism in general, call (800) 308-3394.

*

FISH REPORT, PAGE 11