Heading out on one’s own.

To get a true experience of fishing in foreign waters, I recommend leaving the comfort of having a guide and boldly venturing out on one’s own.

I made this gutsy call on just my second day fishing. It was right after I found out that Cesar had to gracefully decline going out again. Or, at least I think it was graceful. It was hard to tell what he was saying with his face all swollen up like that with mosquito bites. It seems he was also experiencing some confusion, a delirium where he believed the larger lesions on his arms were due to my embedding a couple of treble hooks there. (How could he tell? He was swarmed by mosquitoes when I was casting. Anyway, if he hadn’t been jumping around swatting mosquitoes I’m sure I wouldn’t have been distracted while casting.)

Being out by myself allowed a more intimate experience of Brazil’s unique and eccentric fishing customs and etiquette. It also gave me an opportunity to refine my non-verbal communication skills, so important when one doesn’t know the language. Luckily, I have a natural affinity for non-verbal communication, as will be clear from my account below.

During late September in the Pantanal, the curimbatá like to migrate up the Miranda River to breed. Curimbatá are a bottom-feeding, schooling fish, which commonly reach twenty inches or more. When they migrate, there are so many of these fish that they surround your boat; in shallow sections of the river you see a literal sea of fins sticking out of the water. Sounds great, right? However, curimbatá themselves aren’t a sport fish, and they don’t seem to take any bait (unless one were to find a way to affix mud to one’s hook). Fortunately, with the curimbatá migration come numerous coveted sport fish, like the aforementioned dorado and pintado, as well as piau, all of which grow huge and feast on curimbatá.

Now, normally in the Pantanal one is fishing in virtual isolation. Being as big as the country of France, with innumerable rivers, one can go all day and not see another fisherman. However, when curimbatá migrate up the Miranda, the fishermen migrate with them. Somehow, all the fishermen in the vast Pantanal are able to fit into an area the size of two football fields. This results in a little overcrowding. Those fishermen who like their peace and tranquility, and who can’t stand to be crowded, tend to keep their distance—maybe ten to fifteen feet from another boat. However, the vast majority like to jam one boat with another. That way they can share their fishing nets, trade hooks, and get a close look at the size monofilament the other is using as they untangle their lines.

Curimbatá breeding migration or not, the first day I went out I couldn’t catch anything but piranha. Now, mind you, I find catching piranha to be thrilling. They are a fierce-looking fish, have good size, and they dart every which way when they’re hooked. But piranha also will eat anything you throw into the water, at all times, and are considered a trash fish as far as angling is concerned. I quickly and astutely discerned that fact after about my fiftieth piranha or so, when my proudly holding each fish up for the other fishermen to marvel at wasn’t having its desired effect. Usually, they moved away from me pretty fast.

Eventually I realized, by close observation of the other fishermen, that they were having success with actual sport fish. In particular, one group of ten boats, packed in a tight circle off one bank of the river, were having marvelous fishing. They were catching piau after piau after piau! And not one piranha! However, they were so closely bunched that I wasn’t sure I could fit my boat in. However, I was wrong. An opportunity presented itself, and I smoothly and expertly worked my boat right smack into the middle.

Which was quite a nautical feat. And clearly I had secured the best spot. This was obvious because this had been the spot in the center to where they’d been casting. And to where they continued to cast even with my boat there, although more animated than before.

After maneuvering back to the circumference of the circle, I needed only a few minutes preparation to get set: hooking on a worm, unhooking a few fishing lines that had wrapped around my motor when I moved into the area, and making sure the fellows were resettled in the boat that I’d unexpectedly jolted.

Well, the next thirty minutes was one of my more event-filled and thrilling fishing experiences ever. I caught piranha after piranha after piranha. I was wrapped around everyone else’s line. I got caught repeatedly in my neighbor’s anchor rope. I would no sooner throw my baited hook in the water, then a piranha would grab it and run in every which direction. I thought all this activity was simply amazing, since now no one but me seemed to be catching any fish at all. However, the other fishermen didn’t seem to be sharing my bubbling enthusiasm.

This is where one’s powers of observation can come in handy. I began to note that the other fisherman were glaring at me. What is wrong? Why are they staring? What is the non-verbal communication here?

Finally, in a flash of enlightenment it dawned on me: Everyone was using crabs, while I was sitting there with worms! My ability to read subtle visual cues had come in handy. True, I did have a few verbal cues, such as the fishermen exclaiming “#&%$#@ worms%$#@!! Every time I caught a piranha. Fortunately, worms is one of those words shared in English and Portuguese. Some of the other words I couldn’t find in my dictionary.

Well, I still had my goal to catch some piau, and I’m not a fisherman who’s easily deterred. Within a short couple of days I’d found a bait store owner who’d sell me crabs, and I headed out alone once again. I traveled the Miranda River until I found another group of fishermen who were hauling in piau after piau, many of the same fellows it seemed, this time in a tight circle of nine boats. My keen eye spotted an opening in the upstream part of the cluster. I knew this was my lucky day.

Deftly maneuvering my boat upstream of the group and setting my anchor, I settled back and relaxed and let the current drift me exactly into the narrow gap between the boats. Well, a solar flare must have affected the currents just then, because I missed the location by a few boat lengths. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have banged into this other boat with its three Brazilian anglers, whose intense fishing was distracted only by their obvious admiration for my seamanship.

A less knowledgeable person might have interpreted their strong words as criticism for our unexpected meeting, but my skills in non-verbal communication allowed me the insight that this was just good-natured kidding among fishermen. How else to interpret the courtesy that they extended to me in reaching out full-length over their motor in order to stabilize my boat?

Somewhat embarrassed by their display of generosity, I searched for a means of repaying them. They accepted my gesture of free bottles of an all-natural, one-of-a-kind insect repellent. Which was easy to hand to them, given that I was almost in their boat by this time.

Well, I figured we were a little too close even by curimbatá fishing standards—and anyway they weren’t getting much fishing in, leaning over their motor as they were.  Fortunately, my seasoned boating mind quickly grasped that I could leave my anchor intact and use the outboard motor to maneuver the back end of the boat to a half-submerged stump and loop the line over that. I knew I couldn’t just use the oar to get there against the current (by now affected by rip tides), since I’d tried it three times and kept banging back into these fellers’ boat. So I fired up the motor and proceeded to the stump, a plan hindered only by the fact that by the time I shut the engine off and reached out for this jutting piece of wood, the current (influenced by now by El Nino) had pushed me back into a meeting with my buddies.

By now we were having a lot of fun. These fellows kept acting like they were angry, and the more I laughed at their funny antics the more they pretended to be enraged. Finally, I worried that I was encouraging them too much, and they might tip their boat over with their hilarious, exaggerated movements, so I headed out for the stump once more. This time I had the correct speed, angle, and vector, and I had accurately adjusted for solar flares, rip tides, and El Nino. And I darn well would’ve made it had it not been for my anchor line getting caught up in my propeller. The anglers in the other boat sure looked happy to see me drifting back, having by now decided to discontinue fishing and focus all their attention on their new friend.

Well, it’s not easy to disentangle an anchor line from your propeller, especially when trying to engage in good-natured banter in a foreign language with your fishing colleagues parked alongside. Complicating matters in this case was that by now my anchor had somehow gotten tangled in their anchor line. A slight inconvenience that meant whenever I lifted my anchor to try and untangle things, both boats would drift, slowly, as it turned out, past the other eight boats.

A man lesser learned would have thought I’d shot beloved Aunt Ramona or something, the way my newfound amigos in the linked boat were acting. But I knew everything was alright when one of the more entertaining fellows started making thrusting motions toward me with his fishing knife, an obvious non-verbal communication of, “It’s alright to cut our anchor rope if that’ll help.” And, frankly, it did help. Unfortunately, by this time we had drifted through the fishing spot with the other eight boats, all of which had actors and comedians every bit as talented as my new friends. As they courteously offered advice, no doubt helpful, I didn’t have the heart to say “Eu nao falo Portuguese.” So I just politely smiled, setting off a new round of the spirited joking.

When I finally got my anchor secured, I looked up and noticed that a boat had moved into the spot vacated by my anchor-sacrificing friends, who by now had drifted quite some distance away, preoccupied by some sort of dancing and slapping ritual—which was probably what attracted the swarm of mosquitos to their boat in the first place. I thought these fellows would’ve been displeased to have lost their spot. However, I knew they were good sports when they began waving their knives toward me. Obviously showing a person how to fillet a fish is a Brazilian way of saying, “Your welcome any day. Come back again soon.” Nonetheless, I decided not to stay and fish in the area, what with all the commotion of these anglers probably having scared off the fish.

As you can see, fishing in a foreign country isn’t so difficult. All it takes is some limited vocabulary, a little knowledge of fish species, and some adeptness in the art of non-verbal communication. A guide isn’t necessary when you have inborn boating skills.

In just a short period of time, I built a reputation for myself in the Pantanal. I cannot wait for my wife, who speaks Portuguese by the way, to join me in a trip down from the states so she can see how all the fisherman are so deferential as to depart my fishing waters when I show up, and who stare at me as they comment in hushed tones, like I’m some kind of “fisherman’s fisherman.” I’m sure she’ll be impressed.

Before I left, I gave the local fishermen a parting gift of the many leftover bottles of Wally Insect Repeller. When he goes to the Pantanal next year, he can gather the data on his repellent and take all the credit. Who knows, maybe he’ll be as famous as me.