Basically I see myself is an average person and below
average business man. I tell you this to put my trip into a
perspective. Not in my wildest dreams would I have
envisioned myself traveling to Brazil to go fishing. IN the
end I really went to learn how to take others fishing in
this very remote land and to film the adventure of MY
latter Lifetime. Now for those who do not know me, that is
a statement. IN 1973 I traveled around the world. I thought
that was an adventure of a lifetime as well, but I am
finding as I get older that any adventure you take can be
just that.
I digress....
The trip started to gell about a year before when Leo
Madiera contacted me concerning advertising on Fishing
Guides Home Page, my website. I told him I would help him
out, and would not charge him, since he only wanted to
advertise for a fairly short period of time about a trip he
was going to promote that was coming up in a few months. In
the end he came to Kentucky to meet me and to meet with
others who were interested in a trip to Brazil for Peacock
Bass. We became friends and Leo from Rio as he likes to be
called decided to work with me on a trip to the Amazon that
was supposed to go with a TV show from Canada. WE advertised
the trip, and Leo insisted that I come on the trip at his
expense. All I had to do was get to Miami.
Well, being a less than average business man I had to sweat
the $350.00 tickets to Miami and finally got the cash
together about 3 weeks before the trip after saving for over
a year. Along with the Visa and medical shots, (All of which
are good for 10 years) I was into around $600.00. That is a
lot for me.
I had purchased a Video Camera for my business, in order to
promote guides and charters that I knew and worked with.
Luckily I got to use it a lot on this trip. We arrived in
Manaus late in the evening, and overnighted at a nice hotel
in downtown Manaus. Manaus is a bit different than we are
used to here in the States. The downtown area is full of
street vendors. They are so close together that it is hard
to move from one to the other. At night the Carts which look
like tall beverage carts are wrapped in Orange and locked.
The streets are lined with the carts, left in place for the
next days sales.
The schedule there is also a bit different. They work early
and late, taking the hottest part of the day to relax, rest
and to recuperate. Recuperate you ask? yes, because at
around 11 PM the fun starts.. that is the time folks go out
and stay out till 2 or 3 AM. They get up around 8 and go to
work and take a nap during the heat of the day.
We, Jim Kincaid, Frank and his son Dustin, Leo from Rio and
I, Jim Dicken flew into the small river town of Santarem the
next day early and had a wild and exciting ride to the
docks. The roads in Brazil are in desperate need of repair.
They are a patch work of patched potholes and patched
patches. There really is no, NO Passing zone, as we passed
slower vehicles in semi blind curves a couple of times and
when you are riding in a VW Bus, that is a butt tightener.
(Public Transport in Brazil)
We got to the dock around 10 AM and met with the Captain and
owner of Pescamazon Amazon Tours. Nelson Lage is an athletic
man who has a commanding but friendly presence. WE loaded
our bags into the House Boat that would be our home for the
next week and watched as the crew loaded bottled water, soft
drinks and some of our food for the trip.
The town of Santarem is at the confluence of a Clear Water
river and the Amazon.. (There are 3 kinds of rivers... The
Black Water Rivers which mostly flow north to south into the
Amazon, and carry tons of plant material which raises their
PH levels high enough that there are no mosquito's,
Clearwater rivers which flow south to north which come from
more mountainous regions and flow mostly over rock. Then
there are the White Water, or muddy rivers of the West to
East, main of which is the Amazon River itself which runs
brown.)
At Santarem the Tapejos river, a clear river meets the
Amazon, and the two rivers do not mix for miles down the
Amazon. There is a clear delineation of water as if 2 rivers
run side by side until the two actually mix.
WE left Santarem, and not too long after we began our
journey began to have sightings of things in the water..
Mostly they were fins and grey colors which we found out
were bottle nose dolphins which come up the river and stay
there. Dustin, Frank's son, then started to see Pink things
in the water. He managed to see several before the rest of
us managed to catch site of the same thing. In the Amazon
there is a subspecies of bottle nose dolphin that is PINK! I
tried for days to catch one on tape but never did manage to
catch one though I am still going through the tapes to see
if I might have gotten one by accident.
After a night of traveling down the Amazon we ran up the
Trambetos river to Oriximina.. it is pronounced Orr ih she
me na, which actually sounds Japanese. We got up the next
morning and got out on the water for a nice day of fishing.
Frank caught the first fish, a 2.5 pound black Piranha and
then hooked another of 4.5 pounds which we talked him into
kissing. You will find that video on YouTube.com and on
Fishin.com on the Video Page for my Amazon Trip. Leo our
guide managed to toss a $4.00 lure into the tree's and we
got to see early how hard our guides were willing to work to
get a lure back. Again I shot video of one of the guides
climbing close to 20 feet up in the tree to get the lure. It
is a bit shaky because I had to zoom in pretty close to get
the shot and the boat was not very steady.
Since the fishing for Peacocks was not as good as the
Captain Liked we took the boat and went further up the river
to Faro on the Nhamunda River the next day. Faro is across
the river from the town of Nhamunda named after the river.
The confluence of the Nhamunda and the Amazon river is where
the Spanish Explorers and Missionaries came upon the Women
Warrior race that the river region is named for.
Faro is a smallish town with a few amenities including ONE
Internet Cafe of sorts. You can try to get online but the
dial up speeds and the connections to simple email programs
are not very good. I was unable to connect to any account to
get a message out. THERE ARE NO CELL PHONES in the Amazon..
LOL.. not one cell tower anywhere.
The Nhmaunda river is one of the least peopled rivers in the
Amazon. The river is mostly jungle and fairly flat land that
is not amenable to growing much but Cattle and occasionally
soy beans due to very sandy soils. However this does mean it
is great for growing numbers of Peacock Bass. The bass here
are smallish.. Most weigh between 2.5 to 8 pounds but they
hit like freight trains. Do not take me wrong, you will find
an occasional double digit fish in this river, but the
species here do not get as big as on the Rio Negro and other
rivers west of the Nhamunda. The Advantage of the Nhamunda
is that the rainy season stops in early June so by the end
of July NORMALLY the water has receded enough to concentrate
the fish into lagoons and the main river. On this trip due
to early rains to the south the Amazon River had filled not
allowing the Nhamunda to drain enough and we found our
selves fishing hundreds of thousands of acres of extra water
that was backed up into trees and swamps and had the fish
scattered.
I will say up front we only caught 7 total Peacock Bass, but
we also caught several LARGE Piranha, over 2.5 pounds up to
4.5 pounds and if you ever thought of what a 5 pound
Bluegill could do this is the creature that can show you.
Piranha get to over 8 pounds on the Nhamunda in places. YES
they have a row of VERY sharp teeth as our interpreter Leo
pointed out and later proved.. He caught a nice Piranha only
to have it bite his line off above the lure. This was the
only lure we lost during the entire trip.. The guides went
to great lengths to retrieve any lure caught in a myriad of
trees, shrubs or underwater obstructions.
Jim Kincaid and a Black Piranha..
Our days were filled with adventure. If you check out
www.amazonfishingtrip.blip.tv you will find links to
various videos I shot. I will give a short synopsis of them
as I tell the stories..
The Jacare: ON around the 4th day of the trip Jim Kincaid
and I were working our way back a slough / channel in the
jungle. Our guide Junior spotted a Jacare' as they are
called there, we call them Cayman, but they are relatives of
the American Alligator. He helped me put the camera on the
animal and I began to zoom in to get a better picture of the
animal. As I did this he started to say Jacare', Jacare' and
I was about to turn and tell him YEAH, I got it! when I
realized that a small dugout with a smallish man in it was
coming through the jungle. I spotted him as he came into the
frame of the camera. At this point I knew he was Dangerously
close to this reptile that was large enough to do serious
harm if not Eat him. In fact he hit the reptile with his
dugout RIGHT ON THE HEAD. The animal swirled and left. I
tend to wonder if the animal was laying in wait since the
man had picked a specific small almost invisible path. Still
he came through laughing about the incident and gave us
information about the fishing in the local area. About an
hour later we were forced back to the boat when a hard rain
began to fall. Right after the rain stopped we went back out
toward the same area and spotted another (or the same one)
Jacare' in the middle of the lagoon. I got a fairly good
video of it swimming into the jungle from the open water and
you can tell he swam through a tree as the reptile bumps the
tree under water and the tree drops water droplets onto the
water.
ON a couple of occasions our guides took us down what I can
only call water paths in the jungle. Places with land on
both sides but just enough water in a small channel to float
the boat. These were always intense trips, since we were
close to the land where ANYTHING could have been, as well as
having trees over our heads that could contain ANYTHING as
well. The guides pointed out plants that could cut us, and
also that had nettle like stickers that could cling to you
and cause abrasions and stinging. At the end of the tunnel
of sorts was always a lagoon that looked like something out
of a movie. Totally untouched by man's hand except for a few
places on the way in that had indications of Machete's being
used to keep the trail clear. NO Trash, no lures, no line,
it was to us Virgin Water, untouched by any other fisherman.
Was it? I do not know but each of the 5 travelers felt that
they had visited special places that no one else would
likely see unless they take the same trip, at the same time,
with the same water conditions... which on the Amazon could
be a one in a million shot.
Jim Kincaid caught the biggest fish of the trip. It was a 21
pound Pirarara or Red Tail Catfish. This is probably the
pretties catfish you will ever see. The Pirarara has a
yellowish belly, a dark greenish brown color on its back and
a very red tail. Again there is video of the entire fight.
In particular listen to Leo in the background. He was
convinced that our meager 50 pound test POWER PRO line would
not handle this kind of fish. He is constantly trying to
talk Jim Kincaid into putting pressure on the fish to get it
in.. I finally told him that he had read the wrong book on
fishing.. Us Kentucky and Illinois boys know how to catch
catfish.. of any kind.
Ooops.. I almost left out the best part of the whole trip..
The food. Each evening we had a meal that was LITERALLY fit
for a king. The tastes were knew but fantastic. Brazilian
cuisine is strong on fruits and meat. Each meal had 3 meats.
It ranged from Chicken, beef and pork to Fish and Jungle
Meat.. yes we ate a jungle animal that the Captain purchased
from a local. Not sure if it was Javelina, Capibara or
another animal but it was delicious. Nothing on the trip was
wasted. Our cook Jura was a master cook who works at hotels
in Belem a city of over 2 million farther down the Amazon
River from Santarem. If we had left overs they were used in
the next meal as a stew or in a unique sauce. There was
always pasta and rice at the meal to mix with whatever you
wanted. There was a fruit dish that was made from a
Brazilian Fruit. The pulp was used for pudding and for other
deserts, the juice was served each morning. The juice was
remarkably UnSweet for a fruit.
In the end all agreed that the trip was a total success
despite the lack of Peacock Bass on this particular trip.
Why?
Sometimes you just get a good group of guys together who
enjoy a journey and each others company more than the
fishing itself. This group was one of those. The group was
offered a discount on the trip, but universally all refused
it. The guides and the captain worked hard, and definitely
got us into the right places. Hell they got us into places I
would never have ever in my life found if I had not been
there. Placido the local guide who was hired for the trip,
knew of places so out of the way that we all felt privileged
just to see them.
Sometimes its not the fish that makes the journey.. some
times its the adventure.
