Panama’s Tropic Star Lodge has been a staple of the sportfishing landscape since 1963. The present is a very interesting time at Tropic Star.
This all access pass provides a look at one of the most unique and historic fishing operations in the world:
Read Tradition and Trajectory at Tropic Star in our latest issue of InTheBite
Ready for a Spring Break? Check out the March issue of InTheBite, hitting the docks now!
“Super Fresh” brings you InTheBite’s culinary adventures. This was fishing with Captain Asael and first mate Harol on the “Miss Spain” out of Tropic Star Lodge in Piñas Bay, Panama. How would you prepare this mahi mahi?
Originally a servicing vessel for offshore oil platforms, the 89-foot 1966 Halter Marine boat, the Mama Nido, is now a Mothership in Panama. Photo Jessica Haydal
In 1515, Captain Antonio Tello De Guzman pointed his ship’s launches shoreward in an effort to bring home the bacon to Mother Spain. What he found was an indigenous village, which he interpreted to be named “Abundance of Fishes.” The locals called it Panama.
These days, Panamanian textbooks label the word to mean, “the abundance of fish, trees and butterflies.” In the native Kuna Indian dialect there is “bannaba,” interpreted to mean far away or distant. Even lost in translation, the Central American nation of Panama encompasses all those meanings and more.
Despite its slivery appearance on a map, it is a vast land: vast in all kinds of nature, where the sun will burn you quick and the rain rivals steelheading on the Olympic Peninsula. It has strange animals, some of which will only eat rotten mangoes and will only defecate in fresh water. It has trees as large around as a pickup truck and canopies of foliage that block the sun as if it were midnight. And it has those creatures that make our hair stand up straight on the back of our necks—the ones that swim—and in abundance.
For all that Panama has, its beauty can also be seen in what it [Read more…]
