Peacock bass fishing in Brazil is a whole new world
Published 4:08 pm Sunday, October 18, 2015
The adventure started with a day of air travel, Tyler to Dallas to Miami before finally touching down in Manaus, an industrial town in north-central Brazil.
For a bucket-list trip it was tiring, but not an obstacle.
Nor was the five-hour bus ride to Itapiranga, a small town located on the banks of the Amazon.
As we pulled into town, we were greeted by a small parade of youth, some in what looked like scout uniforms. They were led by a small procession of drummers. Others carried banners saying something in Portuguese.
It wasn’t a parade for the arriving American fishermen, but it was a sign that this was not your Brazil of Carnival or the 2016 Olympics. It was more the Brazil of National Geographic. Down the Amazon River about 200 miles from Manaus it was the beginning of a whole new world. For Americans, it could have been a million miles out of their comfort zone.
It was not. It was the starting point for a week of a peacock bass fishing adventure on the Uatumã River, one of tributaries feeding the Amazon. Six days of fishing. Sleeping and eating on the Otter, a mammoth, 80-foot long houseboat, then spending days on the jungle-surrounded waters chasing the Holy Grail of South American sport fish, a 20-plus pound fish that is as tenacious as it is attractive.
“We started here in 1992 in Brazil in search of peacocks. We spent three years in Venezuela on the famous Lake Guri, but fishing had declined. We would hear stories of 30-pound peacocks in the Amazon,” said Ron Speed, owner of Malakoff’s Ron Speed Jr. Adventures.
This was his first trip of the season. My first trip period.
For Speed’s company there are two peacock bass seasons, one in October on the Uatumã or Jatapu rivers. The other comes in December and January when the boat travels downstream from Manaus on the Rio Negro.
Peacock bass is a species that is attracts fishermen worldwide. Our group was all-American, but came from around the country, Illinois, North Carolina, Michigan, Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri and of course Texas. Only two of us were newcomers. Some had been coming since Speed started taking groups in 1994. Some refused to go home after this year’s first trip and were on their second consecutive week fishing. It was, they explained, something of an addiction.
As the fishermen ate and slept the first night the Otter and a support boat completed a five-hour run upriver to where it dropped anchor for the night.
Come daylight I didn’t know what to expect. What I found was a sky thick with smoke from locals burning forest land to farm or raise a few scraggly cattle or grow manioc, a plant used to make a type of flour. It looked like a losing proposition because it appeared as fast as they would clear one spot the jungle would reclaim another.
The smoke hung close to the river the first few hours of the morning and the last few of the afternoon before lifting. It wasn’t everywhere.
Another thing was the vastness of the area. The Uatumã is a tributary that at points was three, four, maybe five miles wide. It looked like a lake and felt like a lake until you realized it went on more than a hundred miles before dumping in the Amazon.
It was actually the second day before I was really able to comprehend everything going on around me. During the week we saw a couple of villages of maybe 15 dwellings at most. If they had electricity it was generator powered.
More common were individual houses scattered along the white sand shores of the river. Some were miles from the next. Most had nothing but floors, walls and a roof. A few had a satellite dish, a sight as odd to me as our bass boats probably were to them.
There were no roads. Their transportation was in wooden dugout canoes or the modern metal equivalent powered by either an odd-shaped paddle or a small Go-Devil-like motor. There were also water taxis working up and down the river, and on one day we spotted a yellow school boat taking two boys to an open air school.
Speed calls the Amazon rainforest one of the last true wildernesses on Earth.
“We are in the sport fishing business. The reason we are here is the peacock bass, however we have had a number of people with the intention this was going to be a one-time trip. Then they realize after they get here you don’t have to be hardcore fishermen to enjoy it because it is high adventure,” he said.
It is especially ideal for bird waters, but then there are the unique sights and sounds, like the fresh water pink dolphins that occasionally invaded our fishing waters and the pair of jaguars that serenaded us just yards away as we fished.
At our second stop of the morning. I hung a fish, but only temporarily. The chase was on.
