The kayak is the drag, and other amazing fishing revelations from Panama’s Pacific Coast

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As my little plastic boat slides up and down the broad Pacific swells, I can barely take in the scene before me. Just a few hundred metres away, a headland carpeted in dense jungle ends in a line of black cliffs dropping into the sea, where the incoming waves break and boil around jagged outcroppings.

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To get here, I’d spent the previous 50 hours venturing further and further from civilization. I first flew to Panama City, and took a six-hour van ride to the tip of the Azuero Peninsula, the furthest south you can drive in Central America. Then I waded down a beach and climbed into a super-panga, a 26-foot-long open fibreglass boat. It sped along the coast for an hour, with mountainous rainforest on one side and open ocean on the other. Save a couple of homesteader cabins, I saw nothing man-made until arriving at an off-grid lodge literally carved out of the jungle on the border of Cerro Hoya National Park. Finally, I travelled another 30 minutes by panga this very morning to reach this spot near the cliffs. Now I truly understood why the area is called Panama’s Wild Coast.

But I hadn’t come all this way to gawk at the scenery. I’m here to catch huge, powerful ocean fish in the most interesting way possible—from a kayak. It’s my first morning, and it’s time to get started.