Costa Rica Kayak Fishing

[Joeykayak]

When my girlfriend suggested that she wanted to go to Costa Rica my mind raced trying to think of ways that I could get some fishing in. I have been communicating with Ralph Salano, a kayak fishing guide from Costa Rica for 5 years now. Ralph has a fleet of kayaks and works out of Flamingo in the Guanacaste area in Northern Costa Rica. He was a quite a bit South of the resort I was staying but he agreed to meet me in a town called Ocotal which was about an hour away. I had a one-day pass from my girlfriend to go fishing so I jumped in the rental car and I was off. Ralph is one of the guys who is not a fishing guide because it brings him lots of money but because he genuinely loves it. I was a bit surprised that he bought down 2 Wilderness Systems Tarpon 100’s to fish from, I thought this was a bit small for ocean fishing but he said the fishing was close but. The plan was to troll this strip of shoreline that Ralph said is very deep water and a place where he regularly catches dorado, roosterfish, tuna and he has even caught wahoo! Within 5 minutes of launching we were seeing schools of sardines being crashed about a mile out or so – Ralph gave me the choice of what I wanted to do so and after a 2 second deliberation I said lets chase the schools around. They were all schools of bonito with jacks and yellowfin mixed in – all some pound for pound great fighters. We tossed small plugs at them as Ralph said they work very well on everything there. Ralph told me he likes to troll right through the feeding fish but I like to cast when I get to them and after both methods were used you could see that Ralph was hooking up twice as much as me. The fish were all in the 5 to 10 pound range- no giants by any standards but it was exciting to know that there were so many species mixed in this frenzy, in fact as were chasing the fish we saw a sailfish fly out of the water only about 200 years from where we were fishing.

After about 3 hours of chasing the fish down we took a break on a sandy white beach where Ralph made some sashimi from the tuna and I walked the beach and tossed a popper to kill some time. I had an explosion on my plug and was fighting a fish for about 5 minutes, I finally beached a 4” needlefish that eventually chewed threw the line just as I got him in, a wave then took it back into the ocean.

In the time we were taking a break the winds went from calm to blowing over 30 MPH in no time at all. We were about 3 miles away from the launch spot so the paddle back was no fun.

I guess when you spend enough time on the water fishing you can really gauge when a fisherman or a guide knows his stuff and Ralph really knows he stuff and is a great guy to boot. Before kayak fishing he was a mate on a fishing boat and a surfishing guide in Costa Rica. I am thinking about putting a trip together to go back as a group and do a week of kayak fishing so if there is any interest let me know.

If you want more info you can email Ralph at ralph@costaricawildfishing.com