The Adventures of the Vessel Condesa

Clark February 27th, 2008

I’m in northern Costa Rica, sitting in my friend Larry’s real estate office. Since I’ve cruised this country before, I sailed up the whole coast in less than a week. I tried to check in at Quepos, but there’s no customs office there. They insist that it’s a port of entry, but that they just don’t have customs: Kind of like a restaurant that doesn’t have food. I ended up cruising for a week before finally checking in at El Coco, where it was the usual two day ordeal.

I’ve been fishing like a madman, trying to put some fresh food on the table. After getting much advice on the subject, I bought some new lures and switched back to my old rod and reel. I was using bombproof handlines made of clothesline and stainless cable, and having pretty good results over the years with little loss of tackle, but the locals say the fish here are more discerning.

Unfortunately one of the fish I hook most is the Jack Cravelle. As I learned clear back in the days of cruising with Brian Sherman, the Jack Cravelle is a great fighter and a game fish, but pretty much inedible. We tried to eat one once and it was like fish flavored cat food, brown and bloody. So I’ve been on the catch and release program for years with the hapless Jack Cravelle.

One day, motoring along southern Costa Rica, the reel exploded, I stopped the boat, and spent a good half hour fighting a fish. When I got it to the surface I could see that it was, unfortunately, a Jack Cravelle, and such a giant Jack Cravelle that I wouldn’t be able to pull up on deck with the leader to dislodge the hook. The other option was to gaff the fish, but that sort of takes the kindness out of the whole catch and release thing.

While I was wondering how to save my poor Jack Cravelle, I saw some movement beneath him. The water was crystal clear and I was wearing polarized sunglasses. I soon saw that the movement was three sharks, species unknown, who made very quick and surgical work of the Jack Cravelle. They made a coordinated attack of rapid strikes, leaving almost nothing of the fish, and scarcely a drop of blood in the water. The whole thing took less than two seconds, and this fish probably weighed thirty pounds. I always think of sharks getting frenzied and going for anything they can sink their teeth into, but these sharks bit in rapid sucession to avoid biting each other, and seemed to get in about two strikes each before the fish was gone.

I was thinking, oh great, now I’m going to have a big shark on my line to contend with. Nope, the sharks avoided the hook with such precision that I was left with just the poor fish’s mouth and the hook.

I had a similar experience a few years ago when I initiated a feeding frenzy in Chagos. I strapped a swim fin to a tuna carcass, thinking that a swim fin with a shark bite out of it would be a fun memento. The sharks consumed the tuna in its entirity, and never even scratched the fin.

Nice to know that when you’re being eaten by a shark they’ll probably leave your watch.

Clark with Tamarindo real estate shark, Larry McKinney

• South America
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