I am not much of a story teller. I simply write what I remember, the best I can,  in words that are simple.
 
Basically I see myself as 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 gel 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 spent the night 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, especially 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, Franks 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 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 Parana or Red Tail Catfish. This is probably the pretties catfish you will ever see. The Piranha 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 un-sweet 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.
If you are interested in a Trip to the Amazon on the Rio Negro River in September of 2008 please contact Jim Dicken. JimD072@aol.com

Cost is around $2800 for 7 days in the Jungle on a houseboat, with excellent food, excellent guides and excellent companions.