Costa Rica Fly-fishing for Blue Marlin, June 28th – July 2nd 2016 Trip Summary: Our obsession with fly-fishing for billfish came out of nowhere about 4 years ago. It really hit me like a bolt of lightning. Prior to that, the thought of ever landing a billfish on a fly never even registered to me as a realistic possibility until I started to consistently land tarpon over 100 pounds in Florida. In the world, there is the tallest mountain which is Everest; in the ocean there is the deepest trench which is the Mariana. Both of these frontiers, once deemed to be impossible, had been conquered, so with this thought in mind, I started to wonder; where did the frontier of fly-fishing end and become an impossibility? Surely it must by Blue Marlin. Late nights at the computer doing Google searches finally led me to the website of Jake Jordan’s Fishing Adventures, a site dedicated to fly-fishing for big game. Here I soaked in years of fishing reports where Jake advertised sailfish schools, striped marlin schools and yes- blue marlin fly-fishing schools. Surely if he could post these types of results, it must be possible to actually catch one of these seemingly impossible fish on a fly. From what I could find, Jake was the only one commercially advertising a blue marlin school in the world where he would teach the fine art of catching these apex predators. Following a trip down to Guatemala earlier in the year where we cut our teeth on learning to catch sailfish with Jake, we lucked into raising (3) blue marlin in one day. Under Jake’s expert instruction, Diane successfully landed the first blue marlin we had ever set eyes on. I also got a taste of this unbelievable fish when I broke off a blue estimated around 300 pounds that smoked my reel and then did a U turn and tried to attack the boat. From that moment on, we were infected with bluemarlinitis, a rare and hard to diagnose addiction that makes people do irrational things like jump on a 35 foot boat without regard to weather and go 150 miles out to sea for three days to try and catch another one. This brings us to our blue marlin FAD trip in 2016. A FAD is a Fish Aggregating Device that is set up somewhere in the ocean to attract baitfish and the predators that feed on them. Set up by secret societies, and dead president’s clubs, legends and lore surround the locations of FAD’s. Jimmy Hoffa’s body is even rumored to be somewhere in a FAD off the shores of Costa Rica attracting trophy size blue marlin. Part of the legend of the FAD’s relates to secret billionaires that hire clandestine vessels to dump these devices off passing freighters while the CIA tracks their locations from spy satellites up in the heavens. These secret locations are communicated via mailbox drops and encrypted cell phones to guys like Jake and the captains he fishes with. What this means is fishing with Jake opens the door to a secret world and blue marlin nirvana. To keep this short, our three day trip ended up being the roughest seas Jake had ever seen in Costa Rica. 140 miles out at sea, we bobbed around like a cork in washing machine while the boat powered up and down swells chasing these mythical fish. After initially barfing over the side of the boat, I quickly got my sea legs, and the rest was history. For our three days at sea, we raised a total of 32 blue marlin, had 11 blue marlin bites and landed 6 blue marlin on flies. We also went 3 for 3 on sailfish. To read a full detailed trip report as written by Jake Jordan, please click the “Articles” link at the top of the page.

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