Costa Rica Fishing

July, 2016

I am not a fan of getting older.  There aren’t many perks.  But when your best friend says, “Hey, for our next birthday, let’s all go to Costa Rica!”

That is a perk.

So five of us guys, who have been friends for a VERY long time left our families behind (we missed them terribly) and headed to Jaco, Costa Rica for ten days.  Of course, ONE of those days had to involve fishing.  You can’t go to Costa Rica without spending at least one day off-shore fishing for sailfish and marlin.

So we did!

We contacted a Captain down there named Mike Alligood.  He put us on one of his custom-built 33 ft center consoles.  We headed out promptly at 7 a.m. out of Los Suenos.  (It is near Jaco).

We headed out 30 miles.  Unfortunately, we had to go through a pretty big storm and in fact, it rained almost all day on us out there.  It was never a beautiful, sunny day, and the waves were pretty bad, but hey, we were still fishing Costa Rica baby!  Since I paid for the trip the guys agreed that if we got a sailfish on the line, they would allow me to reel in the first one.

Normally, I like to type a lot in my blogs, but I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

I had actually caught a sailfish many years ago in Costa Rica, but the guys I was with failed to get a decent picture of me doing it, so it was very important, I told them, to make sure they got a photo of me holding a fish if we caught one.

We caught the first sailfish after about 15 minutes of fishing!  Hey, this is starting out to be a great day.  Then, we went 5 hours without catching a damn thing.  That part of the trip sucked.  We took a break from catching sailfish and attempted to catch some yellow-fin tuna, but we didn't have much look with that either.

About seven hours into the trip, this happened to Nick:

Needless to say, Nick and I were pretty pleased.  Of course, we just HAD to fly the Captain Hook colors:

Alas, we ran out of day, it was getting late.  The Captain said that it was time to go in.  We were already past due.  He said, "You guys got about two minutes left".  Gene was pretty disappointed as he REALLY, and I mean REALLY, wanted to catch a sailfish in Costa Rica.  

Then this happened:

 

It would have been great to catch five (5) fish, one for each of us, but there just wasn't enough time in the day to make it happen.  Thank you Mike, as always for taking such great camera shots, not just on the boat, but on the entire Costa Rica Fab 5 trip.  You did a fantastic job!  It was a pleasure to have you on the trip.  We took hundreds of photos of our trip (well Mike Did), but here are just a few more for your viewing pleasure:  (some of you guys will find one of them very pleasurable).  Check out FaceBook (Mike Wolff) for the rest.

Thanks for reading everyone!

Bill (looking his best on the boat)

Mike, (the cameraman):

Captain and Crew:

Yeah, we are beach studs:

 Local surf contest on Playa de Hermosa:  OMG!  I miss Costa Rica already.

Yeah, we look the same surfing as the picture above, but I forgot my thong:

Mike, enjoying himself at same surf contest (that is NOT rum in his cup, btw):

Captain Marc Paul