Yikes! When Gordon Ramsay visited Costa Rica recently, the British celebrity chef was met by some extremely unhappy people. Um, a gang to be specific.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Ramsay was working on Gordon’s Shark Bait, which is part of Channel 4‘s forthcoming series, Big Fish Fight. On the show, Ramsay digs into the country’s illegal shark fishing business and more.

“It is a multi-billion dollar industry, completely unregulated,” Ramsay said. “We traced some of the biggest culprits to Costa Rica. The day before we got there, a Taiwanese crew landed a haul of hammerhead sharks – police searched the boat and found bails of cocaine. These gangs operate from places that are like forts, with barbed-wire perimeters and gun towers.”

When the 44-year-old star of BBC America’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares was met by some of these thugs, they poured gasoline over his head and held him at gunpoint. Holy crap!

He explained: “At one, I managed to shake off the people who were keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands and thousands of fins, drying on rooftops as far as the eye could see.”

“When I got back downstairs they tipped a barrel of petrol over me. Then these cars with blacked out windows suddenly appeared from nowhere, trying to block us in. We dived into the car and peeled off.”

When Ramsay and his film crew started filming again, they ended up coercing one of the said illegal fishing boats to allow them on board with hopes of getting a closer look at their craft. According to The Daily Mail, he eventually dove into the water “to swim with marlin” but also made a grim discovery in the process.

“I swam under the keel and saw this sack tied to it. I opened it and it was full of shark fins, huge ones from 20-year-olds. How they do it is quite upsetting. They shock them with an electric prod, but the shark’s still moving while they cut it up and throw it back dying into the water. No wonder they wanted to hide the evidence. The minute I threw this bag on deck, everyone started screaming and shouting.”

So uh, yeah, these shark fishermen weren’t too keen with Ramsay being there with a host of cameras.

“Back at the wharf, there were people pointing rifles at us to stop us filming,” he explained. “A van pulled up and these seedy characters made us stand against the wall. The police came and advised us to leave the country. They said ‘if you set one foot in there, they’ll shoot you’.”

It seems that trouble likes to follow Ramsay from time to time. In September, Ramsay and David Beckham took off running from the California wilderness upon hearing gunfire during a camping trip with their children.