I'll start this post by saying "Dave loves to fish", but most people reading this probably already know that, and every time I start to plan out a trip one of the first things Dave asks me is " Is there any good fishing there?". My initial response is always to remind him that I am planning a vacation and not some damn fishing expedition but eventually I go down that path and begin to look for fishing options as well.
To date I have found some type of fishing that we could do in many of the places that we have vacationed, but it can be really expensive at times so I have to research a bit and often times have found a fishing trip that is within our budget and seems to have good reviews.
Here are a few of the fishing trips we've done and how we fared.
Grand Bahama Island - here we fished the reefs with a man named Les and we caught things like yellow stripers, margarets, squirrel fish and the likes. We had so much luck with Les and his price was so reasonable that we fished with him all three times that we visited GBI but we've not been back there in a while now.
Green Turtle Cay - this is one of the Bahamas out islands and on this trip we actually rented a boat for the week which by itself was cheaper than some of the other one day fishing trips we've done. For this trip we did not venture far into the ocean and our reef fishing was similar to our experiences with Les along with catching a couple of reef sharks. We also tried bone fishing here and while we didn't catch any of those we did see the fish around and it was really fun trying to catch them.
Curacao - we wanted an off shore experience here and ended up on a boat with three other people an the only bites we got were for two little barracudas. The only memory from this trip was being stopped by the marine patrol when we reached the dock. No problem for us but the captain didn't have all his papers in order so he was going to have to go and get them and produce them. Hindsight should have told me from this experience to carry some ID as the marine patrol did ask us for it but they did not care that some of us didn't have any ID so I guess it didn't sink in for me.
Costa Rica 2013 - the last time we visited CR we went fishing on Lake Arenal with Capt Ron to try for peacock bass and machaca which is much like a pirhana but we did not do well here either. Dave didn't catch anything and I only caught one machaca. Ron had warned us that fishing had been slow recently but since you never know what will happen we went out anyway. The lake itself is beautiful and it was a really nice morning, just no fish. Ron also hooked us up with one of his friends in Samara where we would be staying later in our trip. Frank was a young guy and took us on a half day trip to try to find some tuna. It was a long half day with only one small yellow fin tuna that Dave reeled in but it wasn't the big fight that he was hoping it to be. Frank was trying so hard to get us onto some fish, he even stayed out past the half day mark but the fish were just not biting. When got back in we gave our little tuna to a local family because we didn't rent a house and had no where to cook it.
Costa Rica 2015 - And that brings us to our current trip. I heard many reviews that the area we are in now has great off shore fishing so I scouted a bunch of options and decided on Quepos Fish Adventures which had good reviews and a reasonable price. We were due to head out at 7:00 so we got up at 6:00, downed a little coffee and off to the dock we went. Capt Johnny greeted us and off we went. On our way out to deeper water we saw some flying fish, several turtles floating around and as we got closer to our trolling spot we saw a sailfish jumping around and this got Dave really excited as he has never hooked onto something big with a good fight and he is ready to get started. Johnny rigs up six lines off the back of the boat and we begin to troll around, and around, and around..... Seven hours later we start to head back to the dock, fishless, biteless and feeling a bit jinxed. We got nada, none, nothing....UGH I did catch a little nap though so I guess that's something...
I only feel bad for Dave as he wants so badly to hook up onto some big fighting fish just for the thrill of it all but for now we have agreed that we will not be paying for any fishless boat trips. Maybe once we find a place to live we'll hook up with some of the locals and get lucky
For now we'll seek out ways to fish from the shores or docks for free and save our hard earned money for our retirement funds!!!
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