Jurrasic Giants

Visit Costa Rica’s Guanacaste Province for explosive encounters with prehistoric denizens of the deep.

The tide had just turned and was slowly pushing toward the open ocean as we made our way up the coast. I was told that the peak of the reef we were headed to reached close to 50-feet below the surface.

The pinnacle was one in a series of volcanic peaks which sit so close to shore that it's hard to believe the bottom topography can slope so quickly within a stone’s throw of the beach. Most of the submerged mountains here are fairly generic, but one thing's for sure, unlike most fishing charters on the open seas where you just have water to look at with the occasional flying-fish, the inshore volcanic terrain off Costa Rica's Guanacaste Province exhibits incredible surface activity and offers prime habitat for baitfish and crustaceans and the countless vicious predators that feed on them. The prime piscatorial hunting grounds also host a variety of marine-like invertebrates and colorful anemones, which, of course, combine to keep the juvenile fish happy and the entire stretch a real fish magnet.

We made our morning jaunt from Flamingo Beach – a top tourist destination 47 miles southwest of the city of Liberia – aboard the 42-foot Plautus, a newly renovated fish-fighting machine worth more than $1 million after its recent overhaul. The trip from Flamingo to the fishing grounds was about an hour and a half towards the Nicaraguan border. The Plautus sliced through the small waves like a hot knife through butter as we were humored by the booby birds occasionally picking off small baitfish from the white water we left in our wake. We could have stopped many times to fish, though I was told that truly big fish, the bottom dwellers we were after, were much more prevalent where we were heading further to the north.