Winter 2020
I
f you’re a bass angler and you don’t take measures
to chase peacock bass at some point in your life,
you’re missing out on the ultimate experience. They may not be true bass at all, but they take all of our favorite
quarry’s best qualities and supercharge them into a single
colorful package that doesn’t know when to stop fighting.
They eat topwater lures, jump high in the air, and strip drag
like a runaway diesel truck, and best of all, you get to fish for
them with your regular bass tackle.
The best opportunities to catch them are in the
Amazon, but if you can’t swing the cost of that trip, there are
pods of “peas” in Florida and Hawaii as well. It’s a nice break
for even the most hardened tournament angler.
Recently, though, I had an opportunity to head into the
Amazon for the third time, and while there were smallish
peacocks in the system we fished, the lure of the river
was the traira, also known as wolf fish. They may look
like oversized mudfish, but they grow much bigger – our
group caught 18-20 pounders every day, and one fortunate
angler landed a 28 – and they eat topwaters and squarebill
crankbait like they’ve never seen them before, which they
probably never have. For the visiting bass angler, likely
among the first groups of Americans to visit the lodge, it was
a prehistoric freak show, a true “Jur-bassic Park.”
Complementing the wolfies, we also caught several
other species, including bicuda (“freshwater barracuda”) who
couldn’t resist a smartly-placed jerkbait. The real pleasant
surprise for me, though, were the payara. You’ve likely
seen them on a TV show like “Chasing Monsters” or “River
Monsters,” lengthy silver fish with the fangs of a sabertooth
tiger. I thought I’d had a low hookup percentage fishing
for tigerfish in Zambia, where we landed perhaps one of
five fish that bit artificials. While some of the payara ate
jerkbaits, most were caught on live or cut bait. Is that
cheating? Judge for yourself, but I’d say that even with
that method we hooked maybe two of ten and landed
half of those we hooked, a pathetic batting average of
one-hundred. They attack bait like a Doberman, and while
we tried setting the hook immediately, letting them run
with it a bit, hitting them hard and just trying a simple snap set, nothing seemed to work consistently. Even a stinger treble produced no more success than just a single hook. If you did get one hooked, and managed to steer him through the raging current and over sharp-edged rocks, they’d eventually skyrocket completely out of the water, often throwing the hook in the process. It was as if they’d never been truly pinned at all.
When we handed our guide Itamar the rod,
he probably landed 50 percent more fish that
we did, proving that there was some talent and
technique to improving the catch rate.
As indicated above, I’ve been to my fair
share of remote fishing locales – from Africa
to Brazil to Alaska – but this one was the
furthest off the grid. The lodge itself was
comfortable and reasonably modern, but it
felt each day that our group of eight intrepid
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