Our guide today is Preto, who is just about everything you want in peacock guide. He's been guiding at Agua Boa for 14 years, he's fun, cares about his clients, works hard, and has one of the prettiest beats on the river. Some of my most action packed days have been fishing with Preto, and my wife still remembers him spotting a freshly dug turtle nest on a sandbar, flipping the boat around, and jumping out and uncovering the eggs so we could see them, before covering them back up. Even better, one of Pretos lagoons has given up a 19 pound fish earlier in the week, the largest fish of the week! And his client was also broken off a couple of times by large fish the same day. So, our expectations were high as we climbed in the boat and headed upriver.
Unfortunately, last weeks heavy rains have significantly changed the river over the past couple of days. Our first two stops were two favorites that I have fished before. This time, however, the water was dirty, and when we did hear bigger peacocks exploding on bait, they were far back in the jungle and out of reach. We managed a few fish in each lagoon, but it was slow going. We did have some excitement when a large school of several dozen arawana started cruising back and forth on the bank in front of us. I love these fish. They are topwater oriented, great leapers once hooked, and a little mysterious in that you can't really target them, they just show up. This was the largest school I had ever seen. My streamer was a little large for them, but Scott had on a smaller fly, and was instantly into one. I grabbed a six weight that I had rigged for this occasion with a large Chernoybl ant pattern, threw it out and discovered something. The topwater quickly got their attention, but as they rose up and examined it, if you twitched it, they would spook off the fly. If you didn't move it at all, they would hesitate, and then gently suck it in. The takes were spectacular. I would lose two, before managing to get the third one to the boat, Scott hooked several and landed two.
We then tried a different lagoon, which the high water had made accessible. It took about 30 minutes to work our way up the channell and around and through the brush and trees, including the time it took to actually cut a large limb that was blocking passage with the machete, and couple of times jumping out of the boat and pushing. At the end, we found a beautiful lagoon, and had some action. In an hour or so we landed 15-20 fish, Scott landed a speckled peacock pushing ten pounds and I landed a male with a huge knot on it's head that was 8 lbs or so.
We then navigated our way back out and started working the main channel of the river. The thought was the fish were now back in the brush, but Scott started throwing a large popper and making as much commotion as possible to see if we could draw them out. It was a lot of casting for not much reward. I drew a blank, Scott had two very large fish flash on the popper, but neither actually took it. We finally heard a huge commotion along the bank, and when I looked, I actually saw a large baitfish get tossed several feet in the air. We hustled down there, and Scott, from the bow, tossed his popper in, I waited for a respectful millisecond, and threw my streamer in. There were half a dozen large fish, Scott got a swing and a miss, and I was immediately tight to a nice specked or paca, which pushed the double figure mark. That was pretty much the end of our notable action for the day. Perhaps not what I had hoped for, but still spectacular!
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