The casting is aggressive with no delicate presentations needed – snack popper down, wait a couple of seconds, lift and on the forward cast snack popper down again, repeating until a machaca erupts on your fly. It’s very much an eco-tour gone adrenaline ride with some fantastic fishing mixed in.īased on the fruits the machaca are munching on “matching the hatch” means tying on poppers that have just the right amount of kerplunk or plook to mimic the falling edibles. These fast-flowing rivers are best fished from super puma rafts or similar, floating down through rapids surrounded in verdant jungle. Tom: Costa Rica is famous for its whitewater rafting with some of the world’s heaviest rivers, and machaca calls many of these same rivers home. Adults average about 4-6 lbs with fish over that being true heavyweights, but many of the rivers we fish have very healthy numbers of really big machaca.įlylords: What makes this species so unique to target on the fly? This is probably why the machaca has such a wild set of teeth. When they are young they eat a variety of things including insects, but as they get older they hone in mostly on fruits and flowers that fall out of the rainforest trees that tower over the rivers. In Costa Rica, we have Brycon behreae on the Pacific slope and Brycon costaricensis on the Caribbean slope, but we refer to both by the same common name. There are several species of Brycon throughout tropical America, like the yatorana in Bolivia or the yamú in Colombia and Venezuela.
Tom: The machaca is an omnivorous fish in the genus Brycon that inhabits rivers and streams throughout Costa Rica.