Sport Fishing in Guanacaste: The Best Season Is the One You Were Avoiding

Most people book a charter here on the assumption that the best time to fish is the best time to be on holiday. In Guanacaste those are close to opposites.

Guanacaste is the North Pacific for fishing purposes, and its calendar runs against the Central Pacific one most Costa Rica fishing articles describe.

That is the green season — the months with the lower prices, the thinner crowds and the afternoon rain. For anyone whose trip is built around fishing, that is a useful inversion: the cheapest time to come is also the best time to be out there. Our month-by-month guide covers what the weather is actually doing then.

You can fish here in the dry season and people do. You are simply fishing the shoulder of the North Pacific calendar rather than its peak.

Every angler over the age of 16 is legally required to carry a valid licence issued by INCOPESCA, the Costa Rican fisheries institute. It is not expensive and it is not difficult, and it is the single most commonly skipped step.

This surprises people who have fished elsewhere, and it is worth understanding before you are holding the rod.

All billfish must be released alive by law — sailfish, marlin, spearfish. And the law goes further than catch-and-release normally does: billfish cannot be removed from the water for photographs. Lifting a large fish into a boat damages its protective slime coating and its internal organs, so the photograph is taken with the fish held alongside the boat, in the water, and then it goes.

Circle hooks are mandatory in Costa Rica, for the same reason: they tend to catch in the jaw rather than being swallowed, which makes release survivable.

None of this applies in the same way to edible species like dorado, tuna and wahoo, where the convention is that you keep what you will eat and the crew keeps the rest. If eating your catch matters to you, say so when booking and ask what the boat’s policy is — it varies.

There is one fishing trip listed on this site: an inshore trip from Santa Teresa at from $360 for 3.5 hours, and the listing marks that price per person.

That is worth pausing on, because charters are more often priced per boat — you hire the vessel and split it. A per-person price for a half-day inshore trip is at the high end, and it may be a listing convention rather than the real structure. Ask directly: *is this per person or for the boat, and how many anglers does that cover?* The same question changes the arithmetic on nearly every charter, and our private vs group guide covers why that distinction catches people out across the whole catalogue.

Otherwise, the usual distinctions apply. Inshore is closer, shorter, cheaper, and targets roosterfish, snapper, jack and similar. Offshore is a full day running out to blue water for billfish and tuna, costs considerably more, and is the one the seasons above actually describe.