You can call me a slacker for being so absent from my website lately. 2024 has been my busiest year for guided trips thus far. Not complaining by any means, really appreciate all the support from my great clients and friends! It has also been a busy year when I wasn't on the water. Selling and moving my mother from my childhood home and now hanging out with my mother while she recovers from knee surgery since my work has slowed down for Winter. Moving forward I hope to keep the blog more current.
Early October I went back to Brazil for eighth time now fishing with Nomadic Waters. I somehow was fortunate enough to pull off two trips this year. This trip was a new location to me and my guests. The Rio da Lua was a much smaller river than my previous experience like on the Rio Negro (2nd largest tributary to the Amazon River). This trip was a double occupancy trip with floating cabins with all the same comforts from home. We did not catch extremely high numbers of fish like my groups have from previous trips. Brazil has suffered from droughts the past two years so a lot like Virginia has been lately. Maybe the low water has allowed more predation on the peacock bass, but either way it was a fantastic trip. The Rio da Lua did offer up some great peacocks with every guest but one catching a fish over 10 pounds on the fly. Our largest fish was in 18 pound range, with a few anglers getting multiple large fish. It was great to see a different fishery and meet some new guides and make new friends in Brazil. It was really awesome how we got to the Rio da Lua, first time on a float plane and it was sweet to land on the water right by your cabin! A few of us finished the trip with a arapiama fishing trip on our last day in Brazil. My last experience doing this didn't go well for me because I decided to stick with the fly no matter what and well I didn't catch one. So this time I advised my group and myself just start with bait and catch one first before moving to the fly rod. We did just that and Shannon and James both caught multiple huge fish on bait. As soon as I landed my 150 pounder on bait I switched to the fly. I ended up catching two on the fly, one 40 pound and one around 80 pounds. Arapiama are a absolute blast on bait or fly and highly recommend the challenge of this huge fish.
I'm heading back to Brazil this coming February 2025 to the Rio Negro which is the mothership trip. I have set my dates for 2026 January 31-February 8th so if peacock bass fishing has been on your bucket list I would love to show you want jungle fishing is all about.
