Rumble in the Jungle Amazon 2023 Day Four Sometimes, it just comes down to one cast

 Today, we woke up to rain BEATING on the roof of the cabin.  It's dark, overcast, and there doesn't seem to be much hope of it letting up any time soon.  So, let's fish!  Greyson is feeling....better.  Not good, I don't think, but he says he is fishing.  I don't blame him.  I can't imagine even missing one day, much less two.  

Our guide today is Daniel, who is in his third year.  Daniel works hard, has good fish spotting skills, is very tuned in to hunting for arapaima, but the one thing I wish I could change, is that he is extremely soft spoken.  Sometimes the person in the middle of the boat has to act as an interpreter, because the person on the bow can't hear him at all.  Daniels beat is one of the lower upriver beats, about a 45 minute run from the lodge.  

Did I mention it was pouring?  We arrived upriver and our first stop was a huge lagoon.  I've fished it many times before.  It never seems to be the place for big numbers, but it always seems to crank out some double figure fish.  It was raining so hard, everything was soaked, sunglasses were fogged up, cell phone cameras were instantly smudgy.  So, not many pics, partly because of the weather, partly because it was a pretty slow day.

We started picking away at fish right away on the first shoreline.  About every ten minutes, one of us would get a grab, and we landed eight to ten what I call mid size fish, in the six to eight pound range.  Fish of this size are a riot on a fly rod, and Greyson then nailed a nice 13 pound fish.  And immediately after that, it went DEAD.  The caps are to emphasize how dead it really was.

We poled our way slowly around the lagoon, throwing long blind casts up to the bank, and then working the fly back with medium speed, long strips.  After a while, when one good cast after another is answered with nothing, it gets to be a little bit of grind.  Attention flags.  Some people even start to feel a little sorry for themselves.  And then it happened.  We were poling along a small stand of flooded trees quite a ways out from the bank.  I made a cast just like my last 200 casts, and just a few strips in got absolutely crushed.  This fish pulled like it weighed 100 pounds.  It surged for the trees, and I actually grabbed the fly line with both hands, bent my knees, and braced my feet on the sides of the boat.  For a little while, it was very touch and go, but then the fish just gave a little, and I was able to get its head turned from the brush.  Could it be my sought after eighteen pounder?  A few minutes later it was at the boat, and while it was both chunky and long, it came out a shade above 17 pounds.  But one of the strongest fish I've found.

Me, and my foggy seventeen pound stud!

Greyson with his oversized Amazon dogfish, some big leaps!

After that, it was back to long blindcasts, and very, very few grabs.  Finally, we arrived back at the entrance to the lagoon.  There was a small pool, filled with logs that we hadn't worked, Greyson threw the fly in, it was smoked instantly by a five pound butterfly.  I threw mine, and got the same reaction.  Not sure how many we caught.  I kept saying, one more cast, and then we will move on, but I couldn't, on a slow day, bring myself to move on.  These fish were smacking flies, tearing up the pool, and fish were chasing every hooked fish back to the boat.  And for butterflies, they were huge, we caught numerous fish between five and six pounds.  Finally, someone, OK me, snagged a log at the back of the pool, and ended our fun. 

Turned out that was mostly it for the day.  We fished one more lagoon.  Greyson picked up a hard pulling eight pound "paca".  No more fish for me.  When we got back, it seemed as always, everyone had lots of highlights to share, the most important, the other Randy, fishing with Caboclo, picked up an 18.5 lb fish.  I saw Caboclo that night, and asked him how it was someone else had caught my fish!  Agua Boa.  It's the best.

Randy Cleveland with a good one!

                                                         Kelly Henn showing how it's done.