How anyone ends up here.
I found Tembladera in 2013. A friend invited me to fish the most remote water on the Azuero Peninsula — a place many Panamanians still do not know exists.
One trip was enough. This was the place to fish from a kayak. Two miles out and you are over 500 metres of water, then a thousand. That is why coastal fish and deep-sea fish mix here.
But it was never only the big fish. It was the number of species and everything else living around them. Turtles, mantas, whales. On land, monkeys, iguanas and an uncountable variety of insects.
Tembladera is the place I imagined having when I found sport fishing as a boy, fishing next to my father.
The lodge is our home before it is a fishing lodge.Roque Freitas
Moved from Brazil to Panamá.
Bought a first kayak, looking for a lighter way into fishing.
Met Pascal Artieda and saw the lodge being built on the Wild Coast. Began guiding here.
Began importing his own kayak models and built the largest fishing kayak business in Panamá.
Founded and runs the PanaYaks Kayak Fishing League.
Took the lodge on from Pascal, and it becomes Tembladera Wild Coast.
Why Tembladera Wild Coast.
This lodge operated as Panama Kayak Fishing Expedition, and before that under the founder who built it. The fishing, the ground and the people have not changed. The name has.
Tembladera is the place. The Wild Coast is what this stretch of Veraguas shoreline is called by the people who live on it. Putting the two together says what this is and where it is.
What is added now is the panga as an option in its own right, with its own anglers and its own way of fishing.