Insect Repellent

Depending on where and when you fish, coating one’s skin with insect repellent may or may not be an important consideration. Fishing in Wisconsin in January through a hole in the ice? Not a big demand. Fishing on a boat in the Pantanal during the wet season? The choice is whether you want to fish or spend your days swatting yourself silly. The travel brochures show a lot of pictures of big fish; magnify the large black clouds in the background and you’ll see they’re actually swarms of mosquitoes, ready to engage in a real-estate competition for whatever skin is showing.

And these aren’t your everyday dim-witted mosquitoes, which foolishly hang on your arm until you swat them, the blood splatter signaling your lose-lose negotiation. No, Pantanal mosquitoes are the Sun Tzus of the insect world, waiting until you’re balancing an outboard engine on your shoulder with your right hand and carrying your tackle box and pole in your left before swarming in to feast. Artificial selection seems to have added an uncanny ability to pick out a shorts-wearing, non-native tourist in such a situation from a thousand yards. Historians trace breakdancing to a fisherman in just this predicament. By the time you get to where you can drop off the outboard engine, you’ve changed religions four times in an effort to find one that can send the mosquitoes in the direction of someone else.

And so one needs a good insect repellent. Fortunately, my brother-in-law Wally, once he knew I was headed to the Pantanal, gave me a suitcase of the stuff. And not any of that store-bought repellent that just makes corporations rich. It was his own concoction, the Wally Insect Repeller, developed out of his home in Pennsylvania. As he describes it, the Wally Insect Repeller is an all-natural repellent, without any of the harmful chemicals like DEET. And, as he also put it while loading me up with bottles of the stuff, “It takes too much time to get FDA approval. Can you do the testing on it while you’re down there?”

It was early evening of my first day out with my guide Cesar when the swarms grew particularly nasty. When I informed him that I’d brought a ton of insect repellent from the United States, Cesar was impressed and promptly availed himself of some, heeding my advice to smear it on heavily. When I added that he was in luck, it was an all-natural insect repellent developed by my brother-in-law, and chuckled that he was now a test subject, he kind of looked at me sideways, with his grizzled look, and muttered something about it better work—because the choice in the Pantanal is between some chemical-induced death in thirty years or death in one day from having all your blood sucked out.

I made a mental note of this and decided maybe one test subject would be enough. I mean my brother-in-law once chainsawed the very tree limb he was sitting on, and managed to sever his safety line at the same time. Fortunately, the rocks below broke his fall. Maybe it would be best, I reasoned, that I be the control subject forced to use the corporation-enriching repellent with DEET.

As it turned out, Cesar was not a good test subject. Apparently he’d been born with a sort of natural attractiveness to mosquitoes, a peculiar genetic defect that he’d gone fifty years without discovering until that very day. This is not a good quality in a fishing guide. Between his slapping himself silly, combined with his rather loud, albeit inventive, combinations of four-letter words, the fish stayed as far away as the other fishermen did.

I did make one scientific discovery: the packaging of the bottle is a problem and is something that Wally will need to work on. When I reached down to the bottom of the boat to get a dropped bottle of Wally Insect Repeller, thinking my guide needed to apply a triple dose, I saw mosquitoes gathered on the bottle in a great mound, seeming to fight each other near a spot where some droplets had splashed on the label. Obviously, the combination of colors that Wally had selected for the label, or the picture of a bikini model, proved attractive to mosquitoes.

With one end of my boat swarmed in mosquitos, and the guide nearly slipping into unconsciousness, I realized that we were unlikely to catch anything more that day. But still, overall, it had been a good day of fishing, with a good haul of piranhas, a few colorful trees, and a capybara.