The
Little Country That Didn't
Costa Rica has saved itself for your
enjoyment.
by David E. Petzal for Field & Stream
When
the last river was polluted...
When the last forest was cut down...
When the last fish was caught...
People suddenly discovered they couldn't eat
money.
From a sign in the San Jose, Costa Rica, airport
In a world filled with violence and despoliation,
Costa Rica is notable for two achievements. In 1948, the country
decided it could live without soldiers, so it disbanded its
army and turned army headquarters into a national museum.
And despite the fact that its tropical hardwood forests are
worth many fortunes, Costa Rica decided it could do without
logging them, and so they stand today, probably the last unspoiled
wilderness of that kind in the world.
Costa Rica is gorgeous. It is lush. It is
very difficult for a person to visit and not experience sensory
overload. Colors assail you--birds, butterflies, flowers,
all come in shades of blazing red, yellow, green, blue, and
every possible variation. It is no place for pastels to show
themselves.
Wildlife does more than abound. It fairly
teems. The Osa Peninsula on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica
(where I fished) has been called "the most ecologically
intense place on earth" by National Geographic magazine.
There are 130 species of freshwater fish, 160 different amphibians,
208 types of mammals, 220 species of reptiles (including several
very, very serious snakes), 850 types of birds, 1,000 varieties
of butterfly, 1,200 sorts of orchids, and 34,000 kinds of
insects (and oddly, very few mosquitoes, at least where I
was).
I had never been in a tropical rain forest
before, and the Osa Peninsula has the best and most pristine
in the world. People come here for what are known as "ecology
tours," where you can walk through the jungle on paths
and marvel at the birds and get ogled at by the monkeys, of
which the most common species are spider and howler. The spider
monkey is innocuous and peers at you from the treetops. The
howler tells you what it thinks of you, and its thoughts do
not sound benign; it sounds like a freshly ruptured lion.
Off the paths, the jungle looks impenetrable.
If I had to navigate it, I would pick a tree 50 feet away
(which is about the farthest you can see), take a compass
heading, walk to the tree, and then find another tree, and
on, and on.
I was there because of the saltwater fishing
on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, having been lured down by retired
Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Bob Newman, who gave up shooting
people and blowing up things for flogging the world's waters
and writing about it. He was particularly adept at spotting
monkeys, attributing this to his Marine recon training. "You
learn in recon," he told me, "that the quicker you
spot something, the quicker you can run away from it."
Gunny Newman now drags me around the Western
Hemisphere, trying to make me cut down my number of false
casts and maybe catch the occasional fish in the process.
Crocodile Bay
Crocodile Bay Lodge was built four years ago.
It occupies 44 acres near the town of Puerto Jimenez, and
in describing it, I think of the words uttered by the master
of ceremonies in Cabaret: "In here, eferyzing is beeeyoooteeeful."
The furniture is hand carved from an exquisite tropical wood
called cristobal, by a local artist named Erik Chanto. It
is a luminous, reddish-blond wood that reminds me of Bastogne
walnut. There are flower gardens by the acre, a butterfly
farm, and beaches with not a soul on them. The sunsets are
tropical, and spectacular. Beeeyoooteeeful.
Aesthetics aside, Crocodile Bay is a fishing
resort, and it is in a nearly perfect location. The bay feeds
into the Golfo Dulce, which in turn is fed by the rivers Tigre,
Rincon, Coto, and Esquinas.
Depending on your pleasure, you can take a
30-minute run out on blue water for sailfish, marlin, dorado,
wahoo, yellowfin, and black skipjack tuna; or take a flats
boat into the rivers and mangrove estuaries for snook, snapper
(at least five species), barracuda, corvina, and others. Or
you can fish the shoreline for roosterfish, Pacific jack crevalle,
bluefin trevally, amberjack, snapper (yellow, Colorado, cubera,
greenbar, and black), grouper, barracuda, African pompano,
and Sierra mackerel.
Blue-Water Battles
Marlin and sailfish are the glamour species,
so it was decreed that I should try for them. I had been warned
by the Crocodile Bay people that August was the worst time
to go for billfish (January through March is the best), but
it was the only time I had. Gunny Bob and I brought our rods
aboard a 33-foot blue-water boat skippered by Capt. Scott
Stimpson, the Ultimate Surfer Dude and owner of the most uncanny
sense of balance I have ever seen in a human being.
Stimpson's time riding the curls has enabled
him to scamper around the scuppers in a ground swell that
had me hanging on with both hands, my teeth, and feet, and
wishing I could grow a tail so I could use that, too. Blond,
in his 30s, of medium height, Stimpson is also gutsy. At one
point, our propeller fouled in some flotsam, and he put a
knife between his teeth, said "Keep an eye open,"
and dove into the Pacific, where schools of feeding tuna attract
several species of man-eating shark. As he sawed away beneath
the surface, I wondered exactly what we were supposed to do
if some fanged horror came rocketing up from the bottom. I
would probably faint. Newman would probably dive in to join
the fray. Ah, but in a match between the U.S.M.C. and a great
white, who knows what would result?
The fishing itself is pretty simple. You steam
in a huge oval, roughly northeast to southwest, trailing baits
from rods on four outriggers. The theory is that the billfish
will follow one of the baits, whereupon you sit in the fighting
chair, put the rod butt in the socket, and try to get the
fish to take the bait. Then you hang on and haul. It sounds
easy, but you have to have a feel for the precise instant
when you should haul on the rod. Otherwise, the fish will
simply fall away to one side, and you will be left to eat
your liver.
I can't tell you that I caught a billfish,
but I can report that I had a sailfish come right up to the
transom, rocketing through the water like a torpedo, iron
gray the length of its body, its dead fish eye looking more
like a sensing device than a living organ. But I was slow,
and it peeled off. On the other hand, a friend of mine and
his wife went to Crocodile Bay, and on her very first try,
the wife hooked and boated a monstrous sailfish. Timing is
everything. It's not uncommon for boats to "raise"
more than a dozen sailfish daily.
As you cruise, pods of pilot whales swim by,
their black bodies shining in the sunlight. They are mountains
of muscle with a little blubber as a covering.
Garbage
Riptides are narrow, fast currents running
out from beaches. They are easy to spot because they collect
foam and garbage. Some of it is from the land--branches and
coconuts. But most of it is plastic--all forms of plastic:
kids' toys, designer-water bottles, furniture, toilet seats,
water pistols--the most unlikely stuff. I saw the exact same
thing in the waters off Midway Atoll, thousands of miles away.
These plastic objects are a major cause of mortality among
seabirds, but they are also a sign of one of man's most monumental
achievements: We have succeeded in transforming the Pacific
Ocean, in all its immensity, into a garbage dump. Ironically,
fish use the trash as structure and gather around it.
Terciopelo
The word is Spanish for "velvet,"
and it is what Costa Ricans call the most unpleasant resident
of their country, the fer-de-lance. This serious serpent is
a pit viper, related to rattlesnakes, that grows to over 9
feet in length and has a bad temper and a large supply of
highly toxic venom, which it will share with you at the slightest
opportunity. On the day I left Crocodile Bay, some local folks
killed a fer-de-lance right next to the airstrip where we
had landed.
In reality, your chances of a meeting with
a terciopelo are slight. There are about 500 cases of snakebite
reported each year (mostly agricultural workers), and only
3 percent of those are fatal. If you would like to gaze on
a fer-de-lance under controlled conditions, you can visit
the Serpentario in San Jose. Me, I'll fish.
The Crocodile Will Make You Smile
I've been to resorts in Latin America where
there was a wall around the place, broken glass embedded in
the top of the wall, and guards with dogs patrolling the perimeter.
Not here. People smile at you and do not think gringo behind
the smile.
I've been to fishing lodges where, when the
weather was bad or the fish were not biting, you could sit
in the cabin and do crossword puzzles, or have a farting contest,
or retell the same war stories you'd already told several
times.
This is not the case at Crocodile Bay. A bad
fishing day here is a good fishing day anywhere else. If they
are not hitting on the ocean, they will take your fly in the
river. If you don't want to fish at all, you can sit in the
sun, or take an ecotour (if you do not take an ecotour you
are 10 kinds of a fool, because the Osa Peninsula is like
nowhere else on earth), or look at the butterflies, or sit
by the pool. My last night there, Nature even provided a small
earthquake for my amusement. I had never been in an earthquake
before and appreciated Nature's thoughtfulness.
The Little Country That Didn't has proved
wiser than most of its fellow nations on earth by turning
aside from war and greed. And that is una cosa muy grande--a
very big thing.
Story Taken
From Field & Stream Online:
www.fieldandstream.com
