November 25, 2010

At 06:30 we left the lodge and headed up the Tahuayo river to find some good fishing grounds. Weninger had brought breakfast in the boat.

Tackle was even more kosher than what I thought was the world standard for low-cost bait fishing; a stick with a line, a floater and a hook. Here in the Amazon they don´t use floaters. Possibly because the piranhas attack them, as I found out yesterday.

Fishing here is a dream and very well adapted to children. Throw out a hook with some meat and you will feel fish after less than a minute. Iseline quickly got a piranha, and then another. She had two in the boat before anyone else had managed to hook anything, and she knew it.

Everyone of us got something after a short while.

Héléne is not known to consider fishing one of her top 10 activities, or top 100 for that matter. During our honeymoon hike on Finnmarksvidda (a plateau of marshlands, lakes and reindeer grazing areas in the extreme north of Norway) she tried out fishing one of the first days, probably in a fit of pure love for me. We had hiked off the trails for more than a day and had reached a lake very few people visit. I had hauled in a nice catch of 2 trout and 5 beautiful red brook trout in about half an hour. When she got the rod she kept going for about half an hour without as much as a small bite on the lure. She seemed to do everything right, but didn´t catch anything. When she asked me for a demonstration cast, to make sure she really did everything right, I cast the same place she had and immediately caught a half kilo (one pound) brook trout. She was disgusted and seemingly cured for life of any inclination to enjoy fishing. She returned to the tent and her Hamsun book while i took care of the fishing for the remainder of our trip.

Except for a few futile attempts at the Norwegian island HItra many years ago and some fishing at a fish farm (doesn´t count), Hélène has not been fishing since that ill-fated moment up in Finnmark almost 20 years ago. And now, for the first time since I met her, she caught fish. Maybe there is hope after all? She even caught a red-bellied piranha, the dream of many a fisherman and -woman (Donnerwetter! How i hate those gender-specfic terms. I refuse to use fisherpeson, and using fisherwoman consequently just seems artificial. I will use “fisherman” and “he” from now on. You are going to have to take my word for it: I am not prejudiced). As you can see she really enjoyed it:

We were so busy fishing, we forgot to have breakfast. Weninger had to remind us around 10 o´clock. Both Viktor and Adrian caught their red-bellied piranha:

This is a fresh water sardine:

Adrian caught a dog fish. Look at those teeth:

We caught an amazing number of piranhas. We let most of them get away with a fearful experience they could tell their grandchildren about around the campfire. These guys also have teeth to write home about:

As you might have guessed by now I do find fishing to be an enjoyable activity. One of the things I find intriguing is the unpredictability of it. Fishing can be described by game theory. Just like a good Black Jack player, a good fisherman knows how to increase the odds in his favor. On average a good fisherman always wins over a bad one. On a single fishing trip, however, the results can be very  surprising and sometimes downright unfair. Such as the perch fishing trip I did when I was about twelve years old. There were four of us. Me and a friend my age. We were very scientific about our fishing and did the usual adjustments of floater heights, searched for overhanging trees (where insects fall into the water), patches of reed (where the perch find prey), etc. Systematically we covered the best spots in the lake, making sure to make no sound (communicating with gestures), etc. Then there was my 10 year old sister and her friend, the equally old sister of my fishing companion. The two of them lasted about 3 1/2 minutes before their acute mouth diarrhea unfolded itself in all its glory. Bored, they started to drag their fishing rods back and forth in the water while talking loudly together, giving the earth worms the thrill ride of their lives. Making sounds by dragging your rod back and forth in the water is an absolute faux pas in the angling world (it is the equivalent of voluntarily farting loudly while giggling at a funeral). Not only are you making a fool of yourself, you are also willingly scaring away the fish for everyone else.

Guess who caught the 300 gram (2/3 pound) trophy perch, the largest perch taken by anyone in the family in that lake, by hooking it while dragging the worm back and forth? Yup, my sister! Not only that, the fish fell off the hook before she landed it and it fell into the water. She immediately threw herself over it and caught it with her hands, throwing it onto the shore! That last feat is supposed to be impossible. Perch are so fast you hardly see them moving once they hit the water. Now you see it, now you don´t. Who ever heard about somebody actually pulling that stunt off? It is the holy grail of fisherman ability, the black belt (10th dan) of angling, to be able to do that. It has probably previously only been done in comic books with superhero fishermen, like Green Lobster Lantern and Flounderman. My 10 year old unpalatable annoying little sister did it, and she knew very well how to use the fact that she had done it.

It is still painful to think back at the humiliation and sense of unfairness when we returned to our parents from that trip and I was empty handed.

Interestingly enough, in the Amazon, you are allowed to make sounds in the water with your fishing rod. Of course you have to do it in a dignified and masculine way. The splashing sounds attract the piranha, as they think it might be a hurt fish in distress. This is also why you have to be quick in getting your fish out of the water here. Look what the small catfish I caught looked like when I got it out of the water. It was strange to first have a small fish on the line, then have a very large fish and finally pull a small one out of the water. I had felt the drag of the pirahnas eating the tail off my fish!

Viktor was so fascinated by this that he staged a reconstruction of the incident using one of the white piranhas we had caught:

Then, at last, unpredictability struck in my favor. I had been using my own rod all morning and could fish further away and seek out areas that looked favorable. At 10:44 (cameras with time stamps are cool) I felt something much bigger than usual at the end of the line. I hooked it well and deep and it gave me a god fight. Once I could estimate the size of the fish I yelled the magic mantra all anglers look forward to using: “NET!”. I have raised my children well and Adrian immediately got the net out and got the fish into it like a professional would have done.

Oh, the joy of a fishing man catching something exceptional is pure primitive instinctive happiness.

It was a very large white piranha. I had made a wodden “priest” (he who is present at life changing or ending events) and grabbed the fish while it was still in the net. I whacked it with a well placed blow on the scull, Man, what a thick skull that thing had. The first blow only made it more angry and it slipped out of my hand. Still inside the net it made an incredible last attack. In a split second the fish managed to jump up and bite the ring finger on my right hand. An acrobatic and fearless feat worthy of the history books. I could feel three teeth digging deeply into my flesh. I really couldn´t blame the fish, I was after all trying to kill it. The piranha, like the nordic pike, has an enzyme in its saliva that hinders coagulation. Blood started pouring while I finished the kill:

We managed to get a great catch to bring to the cook of the lodge:

Everyone was tired:

After lunch we went primate watching with Weninger:

This is a family of owl monkeys, the only nocturnal monkeys. Parents on each side, kid in the middle, They were just as curious about us as we were about them:

Afterwards Hélène and the kids went swimming while I went fishing on the shore of the river next to the lodge. Early on I had something very big at the end of the line, but it managed to break the metal wire leader and run away with the hook. After an hour and a half I had no less than 11 piranhas! The others were back and Adrian came down with a plastic basin he got from the cook. It was starting to get pitch dark. I didn´t want to stop because something large was playing with me and nibbling away my bait. On something like the 7th attempt I managed to hook it. Wow, this was the catch of the evening. I made sure to let it fight a bit before trying to land it. A typical beginner´s mistake with a large fish is to try to pull it out of the water too early. If you tire it out first it will have less energy to wriggle and it is less probable that you will lose it when you pull it out or try to get it in the net. You shouldn´t let it run for too long, of course, since you then risk the hook tearing off of the fish. It´s all about maximizing the odds.

I managed to land number 12 by pulling it out of the water, it was simply too dark to use the net. Whoa, another beautiful white piranha! Adrian gave me the light to be able to remove the hook. This is when I saw it. The hook I had lost an hour and a half ago was in the piranha´s mouth! I got my hook back and I even have Adrian as a witness that this is not just another fisherman´s story. All in all I now had 25 piranhas on my CV after 26 hours. Not bad.

One of the guides was in the kitchen when I handed it all over to the cook:

Come and get it:

After dinner we went on a short night jungle hike. We saw a number of creepy things. There were giant tarantulas everywhere:

We saw several scorpions. This one is feasting on an insect:

We found 2 giant bullfrogs:

These ants are bringing parts of flowers to their nest about 30 meters above the ground. Weninger told us that they live in the tree that has the flowers. One team cuts the flowers into pieces high above the ground, while the other team picks up the fallinmg pieces from the ground and carry them all the way up again for storage

It had been a great day in the jungle. It had been overcast all day and the heat was slightly more bearable.

Eirik

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