The above text says: "I first hear the rumor from a fly-rod-carrying traveler in the Houston airport. He was giddy with tales of big tarpon rolling in shallow water and willing to eat an unweighted fly cast on a floating line. No lodges, no other fishermen. The guy was vivid in his descriptions but vague about location – just somewhere in southern Costa Rica.

Like most fishermen, I love discovering new places, looking for the source of those conversations overheard in the fly shop. It’s easier to do on home waters, but it is also possible to find those little gems in more exotic locations. It requires a little perseverance, some research and the patience to accept the trips that don’t work out as hoped. The rewards, though, can be worth the effort and risk.

A number of years ago, I saw a cryptic reference in a magazine to anew operation that Lincoln Westby had opened in southern Belize. I had fished with Lincoln in the past and considered him the area’s premier permit guide. After a series of transcontinental phone calls, I finally found someone who could put me in touch with him. My buddies and I became some of his first clients, and for several years we had perhaps the finest permit flats in the world largely to ourselves. (Not that it did me much good. Permits are still permit.)

Obviously, it is rare to find a hidden spot like Lincoln’s, but the rewards of the unknown still entice me to look for places a step or two from the beaten path. And, it doesn’t hurt that the cost can be significantly lower than that of a package lodge deal. The Internet has opened up access to hundreds of small tourist operations that previously were difficult find, and some of these have great, and undiscovered, fishing.

The ‘Net notwithstanding, however, the easiest way to explore new fishing areas is to use a travel agent in the country to which you are traveling, preferably one with expertise in fishing. That is what I did after I found a cheap ticket to Costa Rica a couple of years ago. I contacted Jerry Ruhlow, of San Jose-based Costa Rica Outdoors, and told him I was on a limited budge, but was interested in sailfish, whitewater rafting and exploring some serious rain forest. (I didn’t mention the tarpon, but they were in the back of my mind.) After I got back a nine-page e-mail with a detailed itinerary, I researched his ideas at the bookstore and on the Web, suggested a few changes. In the end, we put together a trip focused on my interests instead of someone’s marketing plan.

That trip exemplified both the benefits and the risks of new places. I began with a few days at Roy’s, a typical fishing lodge on the Pacific coast that I could have booked through my local fly shop. The captains there knew how to find fish, the food was Americanized, and there was no need for my rudimentary Spanish at the lodge. In fact, the barside conversations were limited to other Americans talking about all the places they had fished, and worse, politics. (Why is there always one person who insists on loudly espousing a political viewpoint somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan?)"

The above text says:  "The perks of a custom rip began only on my last day. Rather than fly to my next destination in Drake’s Bay, I got Roy to have his skipper run the 70 miles north to the Bay and drop me of. The trip allowed only a limited amount of fishing, but we traveled along the outside of the Osa Peninsula, a tropical version of what the Oregon coast must have looked like in the 16^th Century.

Drake’s Bay is a remote area with a small, but sophisticated, tourist industry focused primarily on self-sufficient travelers. Eco tours of the surrounding jungles are popular but, other than a single high-end lodge, there is little fishing infrastructure. I discovered one problem as we headed out for a day of teasing up roosterfish: the lodge’s in-house fishing guide looked at my tackle and said he had never before seen a fly rod. We ended up trolling with conventional gear, bird watching and talking about life in Costa Rica. In the midst of it, a 50-foot humpback whale unexpectedly surfaced directly behind the skiff, snagging herself on the trolled plug. Probably a tippet-class record, but she was foul-hooked, so we broke her off.

The bane of do-it-yourself trips is the unknown-guide factor. Any local with a boat can call himself a sportfishing guide, and although they usually know where to find fish, they may have no experience with the sometimes-bizarre rituals required by fly fishermen. There are tow ways to improve your chances of getting an experienced guide. The first is to set up the trip with a lodge that specialized in fishing, preferably fly-fishing. These can be small but skilled operations that simply don’t show up on the radar screen of the US booking agents, either because they are too new, too small or they offer accommodations too rustic for people who expect an American level of comfort. In some locations, the best alternative is to book a stay at a non-fishing lodge and use an independent skipper. Just don’t make my mistake. Contact the lodge owner, explain in detail that you want a captain experienced in fly-fishing, and arrange the charter in advance. E-mail is a wonderful thing.

When I returned to the lodge after our whaling expedition, I told the tale to the resident dolphin and whale expert. He mentioned that he was from Manzanillo, a village on the east coast near Panama, and that the had some large flats with tarpon on them. No lodges, he said, but the local fishermen knew how to find the fish. The light bulb went on.

Later that same evening, a middle-age American expatriate approached me in the bar and said that he heard that I was looking for a skipper who knew about fly-fishing. Fred Maschmaier turned out to be a skilled captain who knew where to find both roosterfish and sailfish, and more importantly, how to tease them in close enough to the boat that even I caught fish. Before I left, I was already planing the next year’s trip – tarpon and sails."

The above text says:  "The plan began to come together the next winter. My brother, John, and I decided that we would fly to Drake’s Bay and fish with Fred for a few days, then return to San Jose, rent a car and drive to Manzanillo, where we would hopefully find someone with a skiff who could take us out for tarpon. The idea of exploring a new tarpon spot appealed to me, although I had no illusions about actually catching fish on the first trip. Even if we found the fish, working out the logistics, techniques and fly patterns would take more time than I had available. But I had been looking for this spot for several years, and if it took a second trip to bring it to fruition, that is the price of being early in the game. Regardless of the results, I had no intention of revealing Manzanillo’s secrets in print.

The plan was fine, but it is always hard to stay ahead of the power curve. As we were in the process of firming up dates and plane tickets, I received a copy of a local Costa Rican magazine that I occasionally write for. The lead story was about a new tarpon lodge that had just opened in Manzanillo. I was a bit disappointed at first, but soon realized that that if someone else had already done the groundwork, I didn’t need to repeat it. The next day, I contacted Jim DiBerardinis, who was running the operation. I was sorry to miss the adventure part of our trip to Manzanillo, but at least I knew we had the possibility of actually jumping some tarpon.

A few weeks later, John and I landed in San Jose and took the next flight out to Drake’s Bay. Fred met us at the dirt airstrip and drove us back to his place. It was a far cry from Roy’s Lodge. We ate at the family table and played cards with Fred’s five-year-old-daughter, Lily. The neighbors dropped in regularly to chat with Fred’s wife, who had grown up in Drake’s Bay. Scarlet macaws flew past and howler monkeys served as alarm clocks. It was all very Costa Rican.

Had we wanted a more tourist-like experience, we could have stayed at La Paloma, or one of the other local lodges. They cater to a different crowd than the fishing lodges, and their clientele is usually comprised of families, young travelers and eco-tourists. They can book an independent skipper like Fred, and provide a variety of alternative activities. In our case, we squeezed in a day of hiking in Corcovado National Park, which National Geographic once described as the most ecologically diverse place on earth.

These multi-faceted lodges are perfect for the fisherman traveling with family. You can fish knowing that your spouse and children are not sitting around an empty swimming pool, bored out of their minds and plotting to make sure that your next vacation will be spent at Disney World. Be careful about overselling these places though. A friend of mine once talked his wife into coming along with us on what he billed as a tropical cruise – "sort of a second honeymoon." In fact, I had chartered an old beat-up sailboat to chase permit. It cost him a trip to Italy the next year (a nice place, but lousy fishing).

Fishing is usually the focal point of a trip for me, but it is rarely all consuming. Foreign ports offer a range of other activities that frequently prove more compelling than the fishing, particularly when the gods are not smiling. In Belize, for instance, we wandered around the Jaguar Preserve at night with headlamps, looking for the reflection of eyes in the jungle. And, heading out of Placencia for a snorkeling trip to the reef, I spent almost an hour swimming with a pod of very curious and talkative wild dolphins. Sun-drenched days of the permit flats often tend t blur together, but those two incidents remain as vivid memories of that trip.

There are, of course, disadvantages to finding your fishing out of the fringes, and we learned about one of them fishing with Fred in Drake’s Bay. The sailfish had moved. With a fleet of boats such as you find in Quepos or Zancudo, some skipper will soon stumble over them. In our case, without the help of a fleet we spent two days burning gas looking for fish, and it was not until our last day that we finally found a massive maelstrom of birds and dolphins working a school of bait. Spinner dolphins soared and twisted. Bottlenoses ran our bow wake, slipping back and forth under the hull. Brown boobies crashed the swirling water, while frigate birds hung like kites overhead, waiting to steal a meal. "Take your pick," Fred said. "Sails or tuna--they’ll both be here." We stuck with the teasers, and brought the first sail up in 10 minutes. Oh, for just one more day.

However, it was time to move on to Manzanillo, on the Caribbean side of the country. Unfortunately, that involved going through San Jose. One of the first rules of tropical travel is to avoid the capitol city (or any large city) as much as possible. They are noisy, crowded, polluted and sometimes dangerous. When I have to visit a big city, I just plan on spending the extra money and book a tourist hotel. Even is San Jose, which is one of the nicer capitols, I take cabs after dark. (And in Belize City, which is not one of the nicer capitols, I take cabs at all times.)

Transportation choices within a country vary by location and need. I don’t hesitate to drive to the Yucatan, but in Belize it is often more convenient to have a travel agent arrange for a car and driver. Costa Rica has a magnificent mini-bus system. A comfortable van will pick you up at your hotel and drop you off at your next stop almost anywhere in the country for about $20. Driving is a bit of a white-knuckler in Costa Rica, so money is not the only reason to avoid car rentals. "

The above text says:  "Our van left San Jose and dropped down through sheer-sided mountains sheathed in green, past flat cane fields and finally along some of the most spectacular beaches in the hemisphere. About 15 kilometers past the end of the pavement, the road came to an unceremonious stop in front of Maxie’s, the bar and restaurant that serves as the cultural center of Manzanillo. Jim DeBerardinis and one of the guides, Chun, met us there and over a beer explained how the tarpon operation came into being.

Several years earlier, Jim, a retired business professor from Montana, and his wife, Ann, a dolphin researcher, had purchases apiece of land in Manzanillo. It wasn’t until he had finished building an elegant little house that the discovered the tarpon. He landed his first fish while casting a fly rod from a dugout canoe piloted by a local fisherman named Watcho, who had grown up handlining for tarpon in the surf. As the word began to leak out a few other fly casters began to show up looking for local skiff owners to take them out, just as we had planned to do. Jim put his business talents to work and organized a co-op among the guides, training them in the subtleties of fly-fishing. Each guide owns his boat—heavy Mexican-style pangas built for Caribbean waters, equipped with 50- or 65-horse outboards. They work as independent contractors thereby giving the local people an important stake in the protection of the fishery. This fact, along with a bitter conflict between the community and Harken Energy over proposed offshore oil drilling, convinced me to reconsider my earlier decision not to write about the place.

Manzanillo is a tiny village nestled between white sand beaches and dense rain forest. Unlike most of the country, its inhabitants are primarily black Creole, and speak English with a lilting Caribbean accent. The few visitors who wander in are mostly Costa Ricans living farther up the coast, and the town livens up dramatically on the weekends. In a country renowned for its friendliness and ecological awareness, Manzanillo’s hospitality and conservation ethic stand out.

The tarpon fishing is focused at the mouth of the Sixaola River, which forms the border between Costa Rica and Panama. A group of resident fish can be found year-round in the river mouth, but unless the seas are flat, the surf prevents boats from getting close enough to fish for them. In March, the seas begin to lie down and a larger bunch of transient fish moves in to feed on schools of sprat (a greenish herring about 3.5 inches long) and sardines (slightly larger than the sprat colored blue and silver). Unlike established tarpon fisheries farther north, these fish are in water 10- to 12-feet deep and can be fished with slow-sinking lines and unweighted flies, similar to fishing in Homosassa.

Fishing these waters is strictly weather (and surf) dependent, and the Caribbean is notoriously breezy. We arrived at the beginning of March and the seas were still up from an offshore storm. For two days we drifted outside the pounding surf of the river mouth—no birds, no bait, no sign of tarpon. Even Chun was discouraged. It was clear that however good the fishing might be, it was inconsistent, and we had caught a downswing. But that’s fishing. We decided to spend some time exploring the area.

The next day, John and I hiked to Punta Mona, a few miles down the coast. This was true rain forest—Tarzan vines, a melange of jungle noises and brightly colored birds flitting through the trees. Strawberry-color poison-dart frogs sat conspicuously on moss-covered logs, daring a predator to taste them, and a very large, but fortunately harmless, snake gave me a heart-stopping moment. On the return trip, the path led us to the most perfect tropical beach I have encountered. We really didn’t care if the fishing was off.

John left for home the following day—at just the wrong time. The ocean had calmed and Roger, Jim’s only other guest, jumped five tarpon and landed one over 125 pounds. Chun was sure the morning would provide us some good shots, so Jim and I decided to give it another try.

Before the skiff passed Punta Mona, we saw our first tarpon rolling in deep, clear water, On the third case, a silver bullet rocketed up from azure water and hit my fly. Missed him.

Fishing at Manzanillo might be inconsistent, but I discovered why my friend in Houston was giddy about it. We saw 80 or 90 fish rolling on the surface, including some that were very large. Roger, 100 yards away, hooked one that looked like a cruise missile blowing out of the water. It immediately headed into heavy surf where the boat couldn’t follow. Jim estimated it at well over a hundred pounds. By the end of the day, I had stuck five tarpon, and Jim three. Roger had done even better, jumping several and landing another big fish. As usual, I wanted just one more day.

In the end, we spent a week or so fishing waters that see very few fly rods. We didn’t catch as many fish as a mass-marketed lodge might have promised us, but the successes and failures had an immediacy that transcended the body count. We saw new country, met some wonderful people and did it at a cost that was affordable, even for an old trout bum like myself. And on the flight back, I ran into a guy in the Houston airport, carrying a couple of fly rods…."