Panama Rocks: Fishing the Pinnacles of the Pacific

If you are one of the few that missed the movie Avatar, then you haven’t seen the floating islands of Pandora. A recent trip to Panama took me to those “floating islands,” as that’s the only way I could describe the scene. Most of the islands are really just pinnacles rising from the ocean floor. Some rise up out of the water as rocks covered with trees, some just to the surface and some tops can be 200 feet or more below the surface.

The fishing is as diverse and impressive as the setting. Our days out of Panama Nautical Club on Isla Boca started with breakfast at 5:30 a.m. then down to the dock by 6:30 to board one of the four boats and fishing by about 7:00. The pinnacle islands start just off the coast on the Gulf of Chiriquí and are scattered throughout the region for miles out. They call the closer ones “inshore fishing” even though it could be hundreds of feet deep around these rising towers of solid rock.

The purpose of our trip was to fish new products by Dominion Rods. Dominion, with Batson rod components and Panama Nautical Club, co-sponsored a trip for the sportfishing media. The pinnacles are an ideal testing ground for a company which produces deep-jigging and surface casting tackle for heavy duty ocean use.

The Dominion E-Rod is an electric battery-powered rod butt that provides the power for electric reels. This eliminates the need to have your reels hard-wired to the boat, giving you the freedom to move about without being tethered to a wire from under the gunnel.

Even better is that you can go from boat to boat, especially useful if a boat isn’t wired for electric reels. It’s basically plug-and-play—and in this case, it was pretty much all day on one charge.

The event was also put together in part by Bill Batson and cousin Karry Batson, with the Batson rod component company that supplies parts used by all major rodbuilders in the U.S. Dominion Rods is one of their customers building custom rods out of Stuart, Florida. Dominion builds just about any level of rod from inshore light tackle to heavy offshore trolling rods and more.

Deep Jig Fishing

On day one, our plan was to jig fish pinnacles topping out at 100 to 400 feet below the surface. Here we used slow-pitch jigs dropped for snapper and grouper using the E-Rods and Daiwa electric reels. We had both the Dominion Cloud series rods—with classic, parabolic slow-pitch action for jigs in the 100- to 300-gram range—and the heavier “American style” Elite model rods, for 300- to 600-gram jigs. Our first few bites brought up brightly colored sea basses and snappers like the Chinese snapper and more. Then we had a few grouper, scamp and others.

The action was pretty steady as we drifted a few different spots. The mates would also put out free-swimming live baits on the surface for passing jacks and tuna, sailfish and more.

After an hour or so of slow pitch, we picked up and moved to a few tuna spots. These were a little farther and deeper, but still had the pinnacles below. For this we had to ditch the electrics and load up with specialized popping rods and long-cast, high-capacity spinning reels.

The captain marked fish down a hundred feet and so we dropped a dorsal-hooked blue runner down and almost immediately hooked up to a good one. We passed the rod around a few times for a team effort as the fish took some heavy runs and pulled serious drag off our spinning reel—the lightest of the three we had out. We landed a yellowfin tuna after a 35-minute fight.

Our next stop was inshore for topwater action with poppers around some of the rocks for roosterfish, snapper and jacks. Though we struck out on the roosters, we did manage a few cool snappers, a small mullet snapper and a big-eye jack.

Roosters on the Rocks

Day two was fishing with Karry and Bill Batson. Our target was mostly rooster fishing the rocks with live baits and poppers. I could watch the popper slinging all day into this amazing setting. The casts were long and on target getting many hits during the retrieve. Dominion builds its OG series popping rods with proprietary guide spacing that includes a first guide closer to the reel, and sharply decreasing guide spacing toward the tip, with the emphasis on mitigating wind coils as braided line leaves the reel on a cast.

Bill brought along one of his father’s lures that was custom made for him by a friend in Hawaii years back. It was a perfect swimmer on the surface and didn’t take long for a nice mullet snapper to explode on it. Bill got it to the boat for a quick net/photo and release. They don’t box these beautiful fish as they try to conserve them for the sport fishery. We plugged and tossed baits pretty much all day with lots of variety, but the rooster still evaded us.

Tuna Far an Wide

Day three was a tuna trip, ranging far and wide to locate birds and dolphins, which on the Pacific coasts of Panama, Costa Rica and other parts nearly always signal tuna. This was also our rainy day, but the action and excitement took away the nuisance of drips and drops as we fished. Most of our bites came on live baits with a few smaller tunas on the poppers. I managed to land a nice 45-pound yellowfin on spin tackle and then quickly went back to spectating and catching photos. After a few minutes on the deck, the mate quickly made work of the yellowfin cutting it up and serving fresh sashimi on the spot.

Each day ended with a mesmerizing run back to the dock through all the “floating islands” to be greeted with a frozen piña colada and fried fish fingers served poolside at the club.

Yes, plenty of reasons to want to explore more Pacific fisheries. Also, some ideas for deep-water jigging tactics and pelagic methods I’ll adapt for the high-relief wrecks, isolated sea mounts and other pinnacle-like structures we have along the Florida coast.

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• This article was featured in the October issue of Florida Sportsman magazine. Click to subscribe.

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