Iโm going to go a little in depth, so If you want the summary: Capt. Gerald was great, would recommend, avid fishermen read on.
From the moment the booking process started, capullo was very good with communication and tailoring the trip to our desires. We met on the beach, they were on time and very friendly.
Capt. Gerald took us in a dingy to the rainbow runner and once on the boat he checked with us again what we might like to catch. I very much appreciated him taking the time to ask. I have been on other charters that donโt really care, you donโt want to fish for sailfish? Too bad, youโre gonna troll for them all day.
Anyways, we took off and started looking for schooling tuna. We didnโt see any for awhile so we stopped to drop for grouper. We caught three grouper and Capt. Gerald decided we would move on. From then we started trolling and looking for Mahi and Tuna. After awhile another boat let us know they found schooling dolphins and tuna.
It was a spectacle! Hundreds of dolphins to be seen everywhere and tons of schooling tuna jumping out of the water. That was amazing to see. My frustration here was that we kept chasing toward the schooling tuna and would just troll straight through the schools and scare them off and then have to chase them down again and try to troll through them again. We did this for 4 hours without a bite. It was crazy frustrating.
As someone that has fished and does so frequently, I would have expected at some point, we would have stopped trolling through the school and scaring them off and instead stay on the outside of the school (we were able to get very close to the schools) and cast into the school and see if we could entice some tuna that way instead of running them off with the boat. But we never did, we just kept running through them. There was one spinner rod on the boat so I was disappointed we didnโt try that.
Eventually we ended up too far south and had to leave the school and head north. We saw a pacific sailfish jump next to the boat, which was pretty cool.
Finally we found another tuna school about 2pm and ran through them again and hit two tuna at once. They saved the day.
I was quite disappointed that in the amazing fishery of Costa Rica we didnโt see any mahi mahi. I expect they were probably further offshore, we didnโt see any seeweed lines or anything where we were, there was no debri really in the ocean where we were to fish for mahi.
It was overall a good experience and I would recommend. My next charter I hope to have different fishing techniques to use when one isnโt working, like with the tuna, I would have loved to throw a popper into the schools, also would have been good to troll a deeper water lure. We only trolled top water, however, when we werenโt in the schools, a deeper lure would have been nice as the bigger tuna usually are feeding with the dolphins and we were in the dolphins for hours. I also hope to be able to get where the mahi mahi are next time.
Fishing is bipolar by nature, as a fisherman I know this. I just felt a little limited in what we could do to make it easier to catch more fish.
It was a memorable experience. Thanks Capt. Gerald!
Iโm going to go a little in depth, so If you want the summary: Capt. Gerald was great, would recommend, avid fishermen read...