Sierra Mountain Times

 

Most Mother Lode residents are content with casting their lines into the liquid sanctuaries of the Sierra where the right lure is sure to attract the plentiful trout native to the mountain lakes, rivers and streams…yet there are those who are in search of bigger fish. Some locals take trips to Alaska while others head to the Bay, but not many extend their fishing trips beyond the borders of the U.S. However, Tuolumne resident Paul Emery recently found himself tossing his line into the foreign waters off the coast of Nicaragua. For those about to reach for their maps, Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America and is sandwiched between Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. To its east lies the Caribbean Sea and its western borders are made up of beautiful beaches disappearing into the warm waters of the Pacific, which is where Paul and his friends spent five days fishing for Spanish mackerel, barracuda, yellow-finned tuna, jack fish, and parrot fish. 

 

“It was my first fishing trip out of the country,” said Paul, who moved to Tuolumne in 2004. “Every year the group of guys I used to work with takes a fishing trip to a different location. Typically they’d go to various places up in Canada, but I was always busy and had never been able to go.”

However, this year Paul set aside time for the annual fishing trip, which ended up being n the opposite direction of Canada’s cool climate, and Paul, along with and seven of his former co-workers, found themselves in the tropical climate of Nicaragua.

Paul, who grew up in Stockton, retired from Pac Bell in 1998 and then worked for Bell Core until retiring in 2004.

“Bell Core was part of Bell Laboratories before the phone companies broke up,” explained Paul, 55. “It was a big company that designed information technology systems for telephone companies all over the world. They even sent me overseas, and worked on a project in South Africa for a year.”

 

All of his friends on the fishing trip had also retired from Bell Core, and while many had shared adventures together while in South Africa, their trip to Nicaragua definitely added to their growing list of tales to tell…and they weren’t all just about fish that got away. In fact Paul’s stories began as soon as he set foot on foreign soil.

“I had the shortest flight out of the bunch,” said Paul, referring to his friends from Washington, Colorado, New York and Pennsylvania. “I flew from San Francisco to San Salvador, El Salvador where I changed planes for the short hop into Nicaragua…about a seven hour flight.”

Arriving in Managua on a May morning, Paul found that he was the first into the country from his group and didn’t know what to expect. 

“All I knew was that it was a third world country and I was supposed to look for a young white guy,” said Paul. “But when I came through customs and I got out on the sidewalk, nobody looked even close to the description I was looking for. After a half hour I started to get a little nervous…and then an hour goes by – still nobody. Finally a guy walks up and asks if I am looking for a charter company and I ask him, ‘Who are you looking for?’ And he said, ‘I don’t have a name.’ So I told him, ‘Well then you’re not looking for me!’ Now I am in a panic. I am in a strange country and I realized that I didn’t bring any phone numbers, email addresses or contact information…nothing! I’m lost!”

Home to over 1.5 million people, Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, is the most populous city in the country, making up a fifth of the total population. Although Paul could speak some Spanish, without his information, he was helpless.

“Finally I found a way to call home and get a hold of my wife and I told her to go into my email and find someone, somewhere to contact,” said Paul. “About three hours had gone by and the same guy walked up to me and said, ‘Are you Mr. Paul Emery?’ And I said, ‘That’s a right answer! Thank you!’ So I hop in his car and we go through Managua, which is a really tough looking city. Although in the city they have everything we have…McDonalds, Quiznos and Kentucky Fried Chicken, there are still ox carts and horse carts…it’s pretty devastating to look at.”

With nearly half of the population living below the poverty line, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and remains one of the least visited nations in the region.

“We found out that a family of six makes $125 a month!” said Paul. “But the driver told me not to worry, because we were going to a very nice neighborhood where the embassies were located. After turning down a cobble street we pulled up to the house of one of my co-workers friends. It had a big gate at the entrance and was surrounded by a 12-foot wall with razor wire around. It also had a guard dog. But it actually turned into being a very beautiful home and we were there for a couple of days as the guys began to fly in from their various locations.”

With the eight-man posse fully assembled, they began their journey to their fishing destination. 

“We had all our baggage on the roof and ten of us loaded into a Chevy suburban, which isn’t built for ten people. It was a cross between a Chevy Chase vacation movie and Romancing the Stone,” laughed Paul. “We looked like a CIA hit team…ten guys in a suburban wearing sunglasses.”

After a standard flat tire scenario to kick off the adventure, the crew soon found themselves out of the city and onto dirt roads.

“We traveled on about 30 miles of dirt roads and the whole time there were bulls and chickens and pigs running across,” said Paul. “Every once in awhile there was a house that you probably wouldn’t store your lawnmower in, but everyone of them had a TV dish or an antenna!” 

They eventually arrived at their “hotel” in a place called “Gigante,” a coastal village about 55 miles north from the border of Costa Rica.

“Why they called it Gigante I don’t know, because it was anything but big,” said Paul. “They had a crank up well for their water so we knew we were in the middle of nowhere. And where we were staying wasn’t a hotel per se. They had four rooms so the eight of us had to double up.”

But at $350 each for lodging, breakfast and fishing for five days with a deckhand and skipper, they weren’t complaining. Once they got situated it didn’t take long to find the little restaurant and bar in a building adjacent to the “hotel.”

“The Nicaraguan beer was good and it was only a dollar a can…so we drank a lot of beer,” he laughed. “They also had a kitchen where we’d have breakfast every morning.”

This meal usually consisted of gallopinto, Nicaragua’s national dish, which is made with white rice and red beans that are cooked separately and then fried together. 

“If you’re hungry you’ll eat it,” said Paul. “But the best meals were the fresh fish. The first evening I got split up from my friends in the village so I hooked up with a couple of guys that had a little bar – just four concrete walls and some plastic chairs. They were a couple of surfers who had bought the place and thought they had made the big time…but they didn’t. But for dinner we bought a couple of Spanish mackerel, built a fire out of driftwood on the beach and cooked them…it was kind of fun. And the beach looked like something right out of a movie.” 

Yet the scenery was only a fraction of the reason why most people came to that region, and Paul’s new friends knew the answer: waves. While the surfers may have not made the “big time” with their “bar,” success to them was having the opportunity to paddle into the picture perfect waves breaking along Nicaragua’s secluded coast.

“It is one of the premier surfing spots in the world,” said Paul. “That is pretty much the only reason anybody would ever go there…it’s for the surfing. There were surfers there from all over the world! Yet our purpose was to fish.”

And fish they did!  

“We’d catch about 100 pounds a day,” said Paul. “There was quite a variety of fish.”

Their mornings would begin with a cup of coffee to go with the early 5 a.m. sunrise.

“The coffee was excellent and we’d sit on the porch and listen to the howler monkeys in the trees,” said Paul. “It’s really neat to listen to.”

After breakfast they took a mandatory swim in the Pacific.

“In Gigante they don’t have any docks so each morning we had to swim out to the boat,” said Paul. “But it was so warm you didn’t mind jumping in to get to the boat.”

The narrow boat, called a panga, was about 24 feet long and was equipped with an outboard motor. Once the eight were aboard with the deckhand and skipper they headed into open water.

“We went out as far as 20 miles off the coast…and 20 miles in a 24-foot boat starts to make you feel really, really little,” said Paul. “Even though it was hot, with ten of us packed onto that small boat out in big waves, I found it desirable to wear a lifejacket.”

Yet Paul discovered that there wasn’t much he could do to protect him from the harsh heat of Nicaraguan sun.

“The sun was super intense…scorching!” said Paul. “The temperature was about 95 with about 90 percent humidity…it was hot. I put sunscreen on so heavy that anything I touched was all greasy…but the next morning I woke up and I was a lobster. I was just cooked! I was peeling for two weeks after I got home.”

But the sun was no match for the thrill of reeling in a big one!

“The biggest fish were probably the yellow-finned tuna,” said Paul. “The fish were probably averaging 20 to 40 pounds and I was glad we didn’t catch anything bigger because those fish were taking 10 to 15 minutes to haul in! It felt like your arms were going to fall off by the time you got the fish near the boat, and by that time you really didn’t care what kind of fish it was. But it was always a thrill. We’d take turns using the poles and if someone hadn’t caught one we’d just hand it over to them.”

Paul, who worked as a commercial fisherman in the Pacific for a couple months right out of high school had fished for salmon and tuna, but this was a much different experience.

 

“This was a little different,” he explained. “This trip was rods and reels as opposed to downriggers and stuff like that…and obviously I was on a far bigger boat than a 24-foot panga. Plus everything we were catching had teeth, so we were sure to keep our hands out of the way. The teeth were big and sharp so most of the time we let the deckhand remove the hooks and then we’d hold them for the pictures.”

The fish they wanted to keep they would take back to the chef at the restaurant who would cook them for them.

“It was a pretty cheap trip because all the dinners are basically free with the fish you catch, you just have to pay for the cook to cook them,” said Paul. “The rest of the fish we would give to the villagers because that is what these people do for subsistence. They go out early each morning in their pangas with their nets and by 10 or 11 a.m. they are back with their nets full of fish. That is what they live off. It is an interesting life, but a little sparse.”

 

While fishing is a main source of income for the Nicaraguan people, tourism is the second largest industry in the nation, and Paul and his friends definitely contributed to that fund through their trip.

Besides fishing, the group also did some sightseeing and traveled to the city of San Juan del Sur.

“We took one day where we didn’t fish and we decided to check out San Juan del Sur,” said Paul. “It was a much bigger town on the Costa Rican border about 50 miles away…but it was a very circuitous fifty miles…fifty miles as the crow flies. The manager of the hotel said he’d call us some taxis, and I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, that will cost a fortune!’ The taxis came from 40 miles away and then drove us all the way to the San Juan del Sur, about a two to two and a half hour drive. In Spanish I told the drivers to wait for us where they dropped us off until 4:30 p.m. and then take us back…and they did! They drove us all the way back and it only cost us $25 each! But we realized that compared to other people over there, these guys were making a lot of money. With three of us in one taxi plus a tip, the driver made almost a full month’s wages in one afternoon!” 

One of the highlights of the drive was seeing Lake Nicaragua, the largest freshwater lake in Central America (20th largest in the world).

“It was the biggest lake I’d ever seen in my life!” said Paul. “Lake Tahoe pales in comparison…but it is the only fresh water lake in the world that has sharks in it! It is home to bull sharks, so needless to say we didn’t put our feet in the water.” 

Besides the natural wonders of the lake, the fish, the beaches and the sunsets, the thing that stuck out the most during Paul’s Nicaraguan adventure was the people.

“The people were very friendly, but I will never forget the police walking around the towns with their automatic weapons,” he said. “We were in the village one day and two Nicaraguan soldiers came to town with AK47’s. After they left I asked one of the business owners what are they doing there and he said, ‘They are getting their protection money.’ ‘Who are they protecting you from?’ I asked. ‘Them,’ he said. They come through once a week and pick up their cash and then go on their merry way. I couldn’t believe that!”

By the end of the week Paul was ready to return to the familiarities of home.

“I was the only one who spoke any Spanish out of the bunch so my brain was getting a little tired by the end of the week because everyone is saying tell them this, tell them that,” he said. “So I was struggling through it and probably looked like an idiot…but we got through the week and made it home in one piece.” 

Next year Paul isn’t sure where his former co-workers will be traveling, but he already has a trip planned of his own.

“My wife and I are going to go to a small fishing village in Portugal for ten days in November,” said Paul. “I plan on doing some fishing there as well. I have no idea what they catch there, but I don’t care. Whatever it is, it must be good because I read that the seafood is great over there. I just love to travel. I would probably go back to Nicaragua, but there are too many other places in the world I want to see first.”

Until then, Paul has no qualms about fishing in the Sierra.

“I love it up here,” he said. “I used to come up here as a kid on vacations, so when I retired I decided that this was the place to go. Until my next trip, I will fish for the little fish up in Pinecrest!”