This week has been special… Well, I guess they’re all special.   

 Katie and I ventured with Captain Cory on the “Panama Expedition” on Friday and as we were navigating along the southern most Pacific coast of Costa Rica I reflected on the view of the incredibly steep and heavily vegetated – Rainforest shoreline.   I said to Katie…”How can I even begin to describe this scene to people, who most likely will never be able to experience it?”  She had no answer.   

 It was at that moment that I decided it was time to send DroneBoy up to capture some photos of the ridgeline, shoreline, the surf and our boat as we fished the outflow of a river that emptied into the Pacific.   When I saw the live-feed picture on my i-Phone screen, I knew that I’d nailed it but if a picture is worth a 1,000 words – I’m not creative enough to write anything about how it truly felt to be there and experience the raw remoteness of this environment.   

We’ve traveled to (and fished) in some of the most remote areas of Alaska, New Zealand and the Amazon Rainforest and nothing quite compares to the Pacific coastline of Costa Rica, Just north of the Panama border.   Here are a few of the shots where you can see our boat with respect to the immense scale of where the Rainforest meets the sea.       

First of all, you cannot safely navigate along this 15 mile section of the coastline at mid-to high tide except via boat because the surf pounds the beach right up to the base of the rainforest and the rocky cliffs. You can hike along the beach at low tide but that would mean you actually have somewhere to go.  There are a few open-air huts “aka camps” along the way but there are no roads, electric power or fresh water (except the numerous small waterfalls along the way).   

Each time we’ve done this trip, we’ve also witnessed people riding horses along the beach at low tide.  Where they go at night…. We’re not sure.     

I’ve also included a few GPS shots of our expedition to show the scale of our journey to the Panama Border where we fished a large rock that breaks the surface. Each number represented on the GPS map reflects a distance of 5 miles.     

This map shows the Southernmost border between Costa Rica and Panama (note the faint orange line that defines the actual border along the spine of the peninsula).     This last DroneBoy photo shows our boat (along with another small Panga) fishing around the rock just over the Panama border.     

On this trip, we managed to increase our “new species” count up to 54 with Katie catching a fine Covina (around 15 pounds), and me landing a Goliath Grouper (in the mid 50 - pound class). Whereas I’ve battled monster Goliath’s before in Florida, they are very difficult to safely photograph when they are much bigger than 60 pounds (this one was an ideal size with great colors that I can actually hold).       

I also managed to land a really beautiful (small) Rooster fish which display the most pronounced black and white stripes when they are under 20 pounds.     

Finally, this was our sunset as we arrived back into port for the day.     Enough fishing porn for this post.  Now for the best photos.   

I said at the beginning of this post that every day you have the unique opportunity to see something you’ve never seen before. Well, we had a visitor the other night that decided to gorge on the same papaya tree that the Toucans have been devouring over the past 3 weeks.   

We were having dinner on our deck around 6:30 PM with our new neighbor Dave Horn when “THIS THING” jumped up on the tree about 8 feet from us and sprinted to the top. It turned out to be a large Kinkajou and it allowed me to take some photos with my Nikon Z-7 camera and flash.       

PS: One more last DroneBoy photo which shows a vertical rainbow at the back of the Osa Gulf at sunrise.