Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is wonderful. For most things, it is a great place.
Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is, however, a terrible place to be a popper.
Want to tussle the biggest yellowfin tuna of your life? Want to catch black marlin, cubera snapper, roosterfish, dorado, sailfish, blue marlin and wahoo? All of that is here… in spades… and more.
This is a great place, perhaps the best place in the world, to experience tuna frenzies. There aren’t many better places to eat mountains of sashimi, tuna seared and raw. A great place for a combined adventure of things fishing and culinary.
Come See Us. We Bet You’ll Like It.
Sport Fish Panama Lodge is a great place to drink a cold beer. To take in a sunrise and a sunset. Magical times here that often take place on either side of a day fishing enough to reframe your perspective. Reframe your perspective on fishing, perhaps even on life.
Sport Fish Panama Lodge is a great place for happy hour. Piled high with chef-made wings, conch fritters, ceviche, and dorado fingers of all manner.
Yes, Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a great place to combine appetizers with cocktails. But it is a terrible place to be a popper.
Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a wonderful place to fish inshore and offshore. A destination to catch more than 20 species in a trip. All while fishing in the Gulf of Chiriquí, one of the most beautiful combinations of land and seascape in North America.
Yes, Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a wonderful place. It is beautiful. It is fun. The guest experience it imparts is boutique and curated.
But Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a terrible place to be a popper. A terrible place to be a Yo-Zuri Mag Popper.
There are not many places in the world where poppers get so regularly accosted. Smashed inshore, blasted, sometimes entirely out of the water, offshore.
There are not many places in the world with so many mobs and frenzies of popper-eating yellowfin. With floating logs that are so often surrounded by big, popper-crashing dorado.
In most places if you can find bluewater popper action, it is likely 60, 80, or 100 miles from shore. An hours-long boat ride away from the places where you’d cast a popper inshore.
Not here. Not in the Gulf of Chiriquí. Such places—places where you can snag a tuna or a dorado on topwater—are often within just a mile or two of where you’d sling the Mag Popper for roosterfish or cubera.
That’s right. We put poppers to work inshore too. And not just on any old, ho-hum beach fish.
We catch BIG cubera on them. Sometimes the damned things are too big to stop.
Ever seen a big cubera eat a popper? Most of the time it looks like the explosion from a hand grenade. It’s awesome.
And there’s roosterfish here too. Lots of them. When roosterfish crash a popper, it’s often with their combs up, knifing through the surface of the water.
When you throw a Yo-Zuri Mag Popper into the wash around the beautiful tropical islands, rocky shorelines, and deserted, coconut palm-lined beaches of the Gulf of Chiriquí, you never know what you might tangle with. Cubera, roosterfish, mullet snapper, sierra mackerel, bluefin trevally, amberjack, jack crevalle, horse eye jack, broomtail grouper, giant needlefish, rock snapper…
Come See Us. We’ve Got a Popper Waiting…
When you sling poppers into the blue water of the Gulf of Chiriquí—onto schools of bait, toward the leading edge of a pod of spinner dolphins, or around a floating tree—you never know what you might catch or how big it might be.
Yellowfin tuna, dorado, rainbow runner—you might even get a follow from a wahoo or a sailfish (sounds like we’re exaggerating, but we’re not). You’d better be careful, there might even be a hangry booby bird who tries to dive bomb your popper.
So yes, Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a wonderful place to visit. You won’t find many places in the world that more easily and naturally combine hospitality with adventure. There aren’t many places in the world that can compare with our combination of inshore and offshore species—or how easily you can fish for marlin and roosterfish in the same day.
Yes, Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a happy place. It’s a great place to see how naturally our team of professional chefs can transform your best fishing story into one of the best meals you’ve ever had.
Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is a great place to smoke a cigar and drink a cocktail on the porch of a hand-crafted, built-on-site by our team, guesthouse. A guesthouse that not only overlooks the ocean, but is close enough for you to fall asleep to the sounds of the Gulf of Chiriqui.
It’s a great place to relax—if you can call hand to hand combat with black marlin and roosterfish relaxing. It’s a great place to think, to experience, to visit.
But Sport Fish Panama Island Lodge is also a terrible place to be a popper.
