The Capstone To our First Panama Trip

Toward the end of our second week in the Boca Chica area Alex and I, now by ourselves, headed out to Coiba for a few days. We spent our time there gunkholing at some absolutely incredible coves and free diving. While there we explored Coiba National Park, finishing the trip with a whopper of a day doing some Panama fishing at the famous Hannibal Bank, where we ran into our old friends from Pesca Panama (see our previous posts).

Coiba

Coiba is a national park encompassing over 1042 square miles and 38 islands. Ruins still stand on the main island as a grim reminder of a penal colony operated there from 1919 to 2004, where over 3000 prisoners served harsh sentences in crude conditions.

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The Prison

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The Hannibal Bank

As we started our journey back to Boca Chica on the mainland, we made our way over to the Hannibal fishing bank located a few miles offshore from the island. It raises from about 2000 feet to a minimum depth of 50 feet.

Bait was plentiful, skipjack schooling and swarming everywhere, oftentimes forming huge “fish whirlpools” swimming round and round. The splashing was audible from quite a distance. The birds were having a field day.

The above notwithstanding, we fished for at least two hours without a strike, other than the skipjack that we brought in to use as live bait.

About 2 PM we got a call on the radio, “Embajador, Embajador, is that y-all? This is Haimmer from Pesca Panama, we’re on yer stern quarter about 4-hunderd yards bauck.”

“Can we come abowrd? We could shore use a reest and some air-conditionin.”

Sure enough it was them and were pleased to have the company. After a short tour of the boat Alex put the jigs back out to start trolling again. All the while the boys and I sat up in the pilot house gibbering like a bunch of teenage school girls. With the jigs deployed Alex came back upstairs too, having lost all but a little bit of hope that anything was going to bite that day.

My First Black Marlin

A few minutes later I noticed a perceptible change in the tilt of Alex’s head and then we all heard it. Zzzzizzz!!, that wonderful sound of a rod going off. We all looked back at the same time to see a large marlin tail walking a hundred yards back.

“Get back there!,” Alex yelled as I scrambled for the back deck. The reel screamed as line ran out like, “there was no tomaura,” as Hammer put it .

When I pulled the rod out of the holder I thought that it might take me with it off the back rail. Luckily, Alex was soon there to put the engines in reverse as I slowly gained control of the fish just in time to keep from getting spooled.

You want it? You waunt it? You? Hammer exclaimed, “Id just as soon haive you put a guun to my heyad as take thait thing.”

So it was on me to bring it in. Alex helped me to get into a stand-up harness and the fight was on. The thing pulled hard! Somehow I made progress with no little bit a hep from Alex who backed down on it sompthen fierce.

By the time I got it to the transom I was as red as a tomato, but as happy as a pig in sheat, notwithstanding that Hammer had been spraying cold water on me the whole time to avoid a complete meltdown.

Later, after pictures, a successful release (and a couple of beers of course), our friends sped off toward shore on their center console. Alex and I went on to catch a few more dorado before days end, remaining convinced that they brought us the luck and good humor needed to find the fish.

God love em!

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