The Quest for the World-Record Peacock Bass

RESOURCES Contact: Wet-A-Line Tours, 5592 Cool Springs Rd., Gainesville, GA 30506; call 888-295-4665 or visit www.wetaline.com. Their Brazilian activities are operated as Amazon Castaway Tours.

Location/Access: The northern Brazil rivers that we fished are tributaries to the Rio Negro, and are located in the states of Amazonas or Roraima, the latter being the northernmost state in Brazil. American anglers fly from Miami direct to Manaus. Depending on where you will be fishing, you either board the Santana I in Manaus, or take a 90-minute chartered flight to Barcelos to meet the boat upriver.

Season: The season is essentially from mid-October until mid-April, although it can be questionable at either end of this period.

Cost: The cost for a week is $3,950, which is all-inclusive from Manaus; airfare to/from Manaus, tips, visa fees, and incidentals are separate.

General Info: The Santana I fishes the Rio Negro and its tributaries, moving as necessary to access better fishing areas. The luxurious yacht has private staterooms with their own baths, and even has a jacuzzi and sauna. It is richly appointed, with a bar and air conditioned dining room. The staff is excellent, as is the food and service. The fishing boats are new 17-foot Bass Trackers. The Santana I also provides laundry service, and carries Pflueger rods and reels, plus the appropriate lures for those who need to travel light.

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The Quest for the World-Record Peacock Bass by Ken Schultz

Stalking this colorful predator in the remote blackwater rivers of the Amazon jungle.

As our boat whisks up the Rio Preto, Rick Schair wraps his left wrist with 3-inch-wide flexible stick-on bandage tape. His right thumb and forefinger are covered with white surgical tape, he’s wearing a lower back brace, and his left hand is adorned with a thin sun-protecting glove that he’s snatched from my tackle box.

Finished with battle preparations, he’s talking nonstop, saying for the third time how terrific this dark black, flooded-deep-into-the-trees water in northwestern Brazil looks.

"Ken, I’m psyched," he says. "This is where the record lives. Am I right? There’s a world-record peacock bass here. Antonio’s caught ’em bigger than the record. Haven’t you Antonio? Sixteen kilos, 19 kilos, right?"

A local Indian native who speaks Portuguese, Antonio is smiling. The exuberance of Schair and the mention of kilograms tells him that the subject is muy grande tucunaré--very big peacock bass. Schair puts his left arm around Antonio and jerks him close with a hug.

Moments later Antonio points to a flooded peninsula, and the boat slows to a halt. Before the bow-mounted electric motor can be lowered, Schair makes a 120-foot-long cast, quickly commencing a ripping, water-churning retrieve intended to challenge the largest beast swimming in the morass of flooded trees, which is called an igapó.

High-Water Hunting Schair is always in motion, forever talking, continuously hustling. From October through March his Georgia-based agency, Wet-A-Line Tours, brings American anglers with a penchant for pectoral-finned peacocks to remote places in Brazil. Several times a season he accompanies a group. This was his second visit of the 2002-2003 campaign with the Santana riverboat fleet.

The first occurred in early October, when the Santana I fished the Madeira River, a major tributary to the Rio Negro downriver from the bustling hub city of Manaus. The blackwater Rio Negro, the fourth largest river in the world, and its tributaries are fabled for giant tucunaré, including the 27-pound all-tackle world record caught in 1994.

But on this trip, fishing on the Rio Negro is subpar because of unseasonal rainfall in the headwater regions of northwestern Brazil, eastern Colombia, and southern Venezuela that has raised the river above normal. That is bad for peacock bass fishing, because these and other species disperse into the waist-deep inundated rain forest, the igapó, which is virtually impenetrable for casting. Anglers are forced to use noisy lures along flooded perimeters, hoping to draw an aggressive fish to the commotion.

Schair’s response to the high water has been to seek a place not as affected by headwater rainfall. He hopes to find it on the Preto, which flows south-southeasterly out of the eastern region of Pico Da Neblina National Park, a remote area of Amazonas bisected by the equator and still populated by indigenous people. Schair has led 14 of his customers, half of them repeat visitors, to the Preto, paired off in seven boats that earlier rode out of a thick fog to a small village, Campino do Rio Preto, which cannot be found on even detailed maps.

Schair gives village elders cans of gasoline and diesel fuel and an assortment of T-shirts and other clothing in return for permission to fish in the community’s area for the day. Although he possesses a government permit allowing him to be here, Schair makes the gesture out of goodwill and prudence, as other outfitters have been here before without seeking the community’s blessing, and villagers are said to be unhappy with them. To sweeten the pot, Schair offers to pay a few of the villagers to be in our bass boats, hopefully to point out preferred places for tucunaré.

Mugging the Woodchopper That is how Antonio has joined Schair, me, and our guide, Iggy, and why, after we have ridden about 10 miles upriver from the village, Antonio has selected this particular stretch of flooded timber.

For five days Schair has been casting Woodchoppers, which are 10-inch-long propellered surface plugs, for peacock bass. His wrists, fingertips, palm, and back are sore, but that is not apparent as he casts methodically. When the hooks of a lure get tangled he hands the affected rod to Iggy like a golfer giving his caddy a rejected club, then immediately casts a similar lure with a different rod. When Iggy is distracted by talking to Antonio, Schair gets impatient. "Pay attention to me, Iggy. We’re fishing."

Iggy, a.k.a. Agimilson da Silva, is one of the best peacock bass guides in Brazil, but he must be weary of guiding his demanding boss. I’ve been fishing with Iggy’s brother, Popcorn, a.k.a. Adilson, this week, and both are quiet, mild, and solid. But on the previous day, Schair hooked a big bass that got around trees and bushes, and Schair forced Iggy to jump into the sand-bottomed water to follow the taut 80-pound line through the maze until he managed to retrieve both the lure and the fish.

This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, since many Brazilian guides voluntarily go into the water to retrieve a snagged lure, even in places where piranha are regularly caught. Schair retells the episode with a huge grin and disbelieving attitude.

"Iggy doesn’t like to go into the water like Popcorn. I practically had to push him out of the boat," he says, nudging Iggy, whose eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses and who smiles but remains focused on the water ahead. It occurs to me that this type of fish-landing would disqualify Schair from an official world record, but even an unofficial one would probably be better to him than nothing.

We have barely cast for three minutes when Schair’s black-backed, orange-bellied Woodchopper lands inches from a row of shallow bushes and is pummeled. The fish digs furiously toward thick bushes, but Schair’s pool-cue-stiff 6-foot rod wins the tug-of-war, forcing the bass out into the open. The fish fights with a lot of mad streaking and hard pulling but eventually comes to the net Antonio has gleefully brandished.

"I told you," an exuberant Schair proclaims. "This is big-fish water." The peacock weighs 13 pounds on our fish-gripping scales. After I take photos of Schair, Schair and Iggy, Schair and Antonio, and a beaming Antonio (against whose slight frame the fish looks much larger), we resume casting. Thirteen pounds is big, all right, but less than half the size of what we’re looking for.

Several empty casts later we set rods down and scoot farther up the Preto.

How Big is Muy Grande? A few miles upriver Antonio gestures to another flooded sandy point. When the engine shuts off, toucans call raucously from the rain-forest canopy. A pair of boto dolphins--freshwater porpoises native to the Amazon region--surface and audibly expel air. The atmosphere is moist and fragrant but the heat is building. It is possible that we are right now exactly on the equator, or within a mile or two of it. Already our shirts are darkening with perspiration.

In a few minutes Schair and I have made nearly 20 casts, our Woodchoppers spewing spray 2 feet into the air and shattering the peace with a violent rip-rip-rip cadence that leaves a frothy bubble trail on the surface. The boat is about 140 feet from the trees, and although I’d prefer not to make such long casts, Schair is resigned, if not comfortable, with this.

You can’t set the hook as well at such distances and you can’t control the fish as well, which I have argued previously with Schair. He agrees in principle but maintains that his guides, which are the best I’ve seen in this part of the world, are adamant about staying far away from the edges and making long casts to avoid spooking fish, to avoid being hung in the trees too much, and to draw fish out from the cover where you have a better chance of landing them. As a result, peacock bass addicts like Schair use tuna-tough casting rods, high-speed-retrieve baitcasting reels, and 65- to 80-pound braided microfilament line that has no stretch. The quest for really big peacocks is about muscle, not finesse.

About halfway back to the boat Schair’s plug is mugged by a huge tucunaré. The strike is explosive, stunning, and violent, sounding like a cinder block dropped into the water from 15 feet in the air. Unlike many peacock bass hooked in high-water conditions, which strike, miss, and don’t come back, this fish followed and nailed the plug.

Schair’s drag is as tight as it can be, but the peacock pulls line off anyway in a furious attempt to get back to the igapó. It does not succeed, and once the captured fish comes into the boat, Schair jubilantly kisses Iggy on both cheeks. Antonio has an ear-to-ear smile, and we’ve all whooped so loudly that the toucans and macaws and parrots and monkeys and dolphins are silent and still.

The fish weighs 22 pounds on a reliable scale. It is a spectacular specimen, with a prominent hump on its head, three dark vertical bars on its flanks, a tail wider than a dessert plate, and a mouth large enough to stuff with a cantaloupe. It has a black eyespot with yellow specks on its tail, a devilishly red eye, bright orange lower gill covers, and a golden-orange body cast. After a few photos Iggy cradles it horizontally in the water. The big dude needs no reviving, disappearing with a mighty splashing swirl.

While Schair wipes sweat from his brow and I put new film in my camera, Iggy takes the Woodchopper and tweaks the angle of the propeller with his fingers. He spins the prop to see that it moves properly, checks the first few inches of line, then tosses the plug into the water. Schair immediately reels up and fires another long cast toward the igapó.

"Got to be a bigger one here," he says.