2000fish's Blog – Steve Wozniak's hunt for fish species

DATELINE: JULY 31, 2022 – IKPENG VILLAGE, RIO XINGU, BRAZIL

Every trip I take, no matter how fertile the location, has a segment where I lose all common sense and get target fixated on something I’m probably not going to catch. Welcome to that portion of the trip.

Mau met me right after breakfast and proudly showed me a tennis ball-sized lump of yellow paste. “Corimba!” he announced. He had stayed up half the night making his special paste bait, just for me. I was excited to get a bonus crack at a species that has given me plenty of trouble over the years.

Looking from camp down to the boats.

We drove upriver past the main village, and as we pulled into the shallows, we could see the classic splashes from spooked corimba. I felt confident.

Three hours later, it slowly dawned on me that my confidence was misplaced and foolish. Even where corimba are common, they are really hard to catch. They are an incredibly skittish filter feeder and have great eyesight. I cast doughballs, I cast bread, I cast worms. I got an assortment of catfish and leporinus, but the Corimba would stay just out of reach, constantly reminding us they were there. It was awful. The Corimba is a soul-crushing fish.

Working around the bits of my crushed soul, I did manage another new Leporinus – L. geminis.

                                                          

They always seem to come in pairs. That’s number 18 for the trip for those of you who are still reading.

We went in for lunch around noon, and I enjoyed a package of REI beef stroganoff while the guys gave me a hard time and showed pictures of some truly monstrous payara and wolffish.

I believe this was the biggest wolffish of the trip, gotten by Owen on a light spinning rod. It has to be pushing 30.

The same afternoon, I finally cracked 20. Yes, Jonah, it was on the whopper plopper. Seeing Owen’s fish didn’t take any of the pride out of this, but it certainly gave me some perspective. There is always a bigger fish out there.

For the evening session, we went back up the river to throw more lures. I scaled down to a small minnow plug and got a striped jacunda – a lovely species and certainly a new one. 

This was 19 for the trip and 2098 lifetime.

More local kids playing in the river.

When casting lures exceeded my attention span, I started tossing around a small sabiki. I got plenty of tetras and small spotted leporinus, but one fish stood out. It looked like a small bonefish, but even I know there are no bonefish in the Amazon. It took a few weeks of ID work from Dr. Carvalho, but this one turned out to be Hemiodus parnaguae – locally called “Avoador.”

I was suddenly at 2099 lifetime.

We closed out the evening by setting up in the main river for big catfish, dropping massive cut baits on saltwater-capable conventional setups. As is normal in the region, pirahnas showed up and started picking the baits apart – it is amazing how quickly they can reduce a whole catfish to just a skull. This is part of the game, so we stuck at it, but I couldn’t help putting down a smaller rod to catch a few of these pests. The first six were the standard redeyes, but then I got one that looked completely different – bright silver with blotchy spots. This was a spotted pirahna, a new one, and I had species 2100.

No, I am not going for 3000. Stop it.

We fished well into the evening, enjoying the sunset.

There are a couple of huge catfish species, notably the piraiba, that patrol these waters, so we spent a couple of hours each night trying for them. We had a couple of bites over the week, but no hookups. Sammy and Johnny have both gotten piraiba on other trips.

This is a piraiba. Gratuitous bikini model thrown in for scale.

We all slept well, considering that while the tents seemed bugproof and comfortable, they were not soundproof. There was some Olympic-level snoring, myself included I’m sure, and the diet, especially mine, was bean-heavy. I was actually concerned that we were keeping the jungle animals awake, but between earplugs, noseplugs, and Ambien, it all worked out. 

The next day, the 29th, was a nearly non-stop Corimba hunt. Mau showed me a number of new lagoons, all loaded with them, and we definitely got a few bites. (A very subtle, nibbling sort of thing as they browse through the bottom and pick up anything that seems delicious.) But no Corimba, although Mau continued to radiate confidence that it would happen. There was one catfish species that seemed to have a taste for the paste baits. With a face like a tiny Kraken, this fish is known locally as a Botihno, and it was species 22 of the trip.

And 2101 lifetime.

Aren’t they adorable?

Dinner that night was REI Chili Mac, a personal favorite even though it often has late-night consequences. We stayed late in the dining tent, looking at each other’s pictures and comparing notes. The guys had now all been out to the lagoons at least twice, and were getting big peacocks and wolffish, with some bonus rays and payaras. The conversation went long into the evening, and the outdoor adventures of Johnny, Sam, and Owen never stopped amazing me. We got to the tents around 10, and we had our one indoor wildlife encounter of the trip. A decent-sized lizard – let’s call it a foot long – somehow got into Fabio’s tent. I imagine it was a bit concerning for Fabio, judging from his screams, so he probably could have used some help. But the group abandoned him. We bravely yelled encouragement until he caught the thing in a towel and escorted it outside. 

The 30th was a long, long day. Mau and I headed out early and put in a futile hour for corimba. We then started working our way into a set of increasingly narrow backwaters.

I was looking for snakes in every tree.

Mau had some very specific small fish in mind, and very soon, we were in a stream with full-on claustrophobic overhanging jungle. He frequently had to get out of the boat and drag us over logs or through vegetation, but he seemed to have no concern about snakes, crocodiles, or man-eating fish, so I felt a little better.

The James Brown of the Amazon – “The hardest working man in row business.”

All this led to three new species, numbers 23, 24, and 25 of the trip. These were the redfin leporinus, the redlip taxina, and another Amazon tetra species. I thought I had added a fourth – a beautiful fish that looked a bit like a lost tilapia – but it turned out to be a black acara, a species native here but that I had caught with Martini up in Florida.

The acara. They also come in green.

The leporinus – this genus was very good to me on this trip.

The taxina.

And the tetra – species 2104 lifetime.

Mau runs the boat back to camp.

We came in very late for lunch, and I couldn’t thank Mau enough for taking me to his secret backwater spots. Even Mega, who had fished many seasons here, had no idea that there were so many species lurking just off the beaten path. 

I took a brief nap, my only one of the trip, and then spent the late afternoon and evening with Mau on the main river. We got plenty of solid fish – redtails, corvina, payara, and another big ray.

A solid but not big redtail. These things can reach 100 pounds, which would be quite a tussle.

This payara was the 1000th fish I caught in 2023. Another OCD milestone accomplished!

These teeth photos never get old.

Yes, this ray would have been another world record, because it was bigger than the first one. If I finish one record behind someone in lifetime standings, I’m going to feel pretty stupid.

I also got one of the bizarre shovelnose catfish with the eyes on the bottom of the head. I had gotten this species in Argentina in 2000.

The giant catfish didn’t bite well after dark, but as long as I kept covered in DEET, the bugs weren’t too bad and the evenings were beautiful. We saw plenty of caimans – the local crocodile relative – and even an ocelot that came down to the river for a drink. And once all the light had drained from the sky, I could look up at the Southern Cross. The first time I ever saw it was in August of 1999, while fending off mosquitoes on the Parana River in Northern Argentina, and it always reminds how far I am from home. I’ve seen it dozens of times since, and I always reflect on what brought me down there – it was really in Brazil that I recognized that my species hunt was much more a lifetime purpose than a passing hobby.

I tried and tried to get a photo of the Southern Cross, and I failed. Thank goodness for the internet.

The 31st would be our last day on the water, and I decided to focus on bigger stuff. It had been an excellent trip – I had 25 species under my belt. I decided to bring the lures back out, give Mau the day off, and just enjoy the place. I knew I wouldn’t make it down here too many more times in my life, and I wanted to just soak it in. I got paired with Johnny and Sam and we all caught some solid corvina and payara, sprinkled in with a few smaller catfish and jacunda. 

That’s Sammy’s payara – I’m just holding it for artistic purposes. And yes, they do a hilarious ZZ Top impression. This was one of the best groups I’ve ever fished with.

We headed in for a relaxed lunch, and I treated myself to the last REI chili mac. The rest of the crew enjoyed fresh catfish and vegetables, but I stand by my decision. Culinary coward though I may be, my post-traumatic colon syndrome is always present. Mid-afternoon, we headed back down to the water for our afternoon/evening session. Just as we were boarding the boat, Mau came running, and I mean running, down to the landing. Curiously not out of breath for a 60 year-old who had just sprinted 150 yards, he handed me a small paper bag that contained a softball-sized lump of something wrapped in plastic, and a specially-tied rig. He spoke excitedly in Portuguese to the boat driver, who spoke excitedly in Portuguese to Mega – the only word I understood was “corimba,” which is Portuguese for “Steve can’t catch one.” Mega explained to me that the place we were going, a broad lagoon behind a sand bar, was loaded with corimba, and Mau wanted me to try his special bait and rig.

It was about 45 minutes downriver to our spot, and the moment we got there, I could see what Mau was talking about. It was a fairly small area, and the bar was shallow enough where the fish weren’t to risk swimming out over it. There were corimba EVERYWHERE. These are a spooky fish, and every time we moved the boat or a bird flew over, they made their typical massed splashing getaways. So we spent a while fishing big baits, and got an assortment of sorubim and redtail catfish. We then started tossing lures again, and in between the occasional peacock and wolffish, we could see giant schools of corimba.

Very kindly, Johnny and Sammy told me to give it a go, even though that meant they couldn’t fish for a while. It took me about 30 minutes to master casting gently enough to not spook the school, but as my learning curved upward, giant schools of corimba started cruising right by the boat. I got my first few bites – subtle nibbles that disappeared a split-second before I could set. So I drank a couple of Red Bulls to make sure I was really, really keyed up, and cast again. As the rig drifted slowly out of sight, I saw the line jump ever-so-slightly, and, in my highly-caffeinated condition, I snapped back hard and got a fish on. Both boatmen were yelling “Corimba! Corimba!” – which is Portuguese for “No pressure, Steve. You have one chance. Don’t screw it up.”

The whole thing took less than 90 seconds, but it seemed like an hour. I backed off the drag and played the fish very carefully, but it was several pounds and didn’t want to join me, so it made a series of strong runs before we got it close. I could see it just feet under boat; I could almost touch it – and my imagination ran wild with hook-pulling scenarios right until we netted it and it thumped into the bottom of the boat. I had done it – I had defeated one of the most irksome fish in all my years of experience, and I was ecstatic. 

This was 26 for the trip, and 2105 lifetime. I was done, and for at least an evening, I was satisfied.

Note that the mouth is set up for nibbling through mud and algae. It’s like a mullet, but worse.

We gave the big catfish one more try, which didn’t work out, but the evening was beautiful and dinner was a celebration.

Steve and Mega at dinner, right before Mega did something that I will never unsee.

We had all gotten something spectacular over the week, and we had all truly experienced the adventure of a lifetime. I reflected quietly how fortunate I am to have been here more than once.

And then it got weird. Deep in my soul, I knew a week in the Amazon wasn’t going to pass without something getting weird, but this was still a surprise. 

The local tribes in this region have a tradition of decorating their skin with ritual scars. These scars are made by inflicting deep scratches on the skin with a device made with payara teeth.

The device.

I could have very easily left it at that and never thought about it for the rest of my life, but that evening, Mega decided that he wanted to have some of these scars applied to his back. It was one of the most disturbing sounds I have ever heard in my life, like a stiff wire brush scrubbing over a side of beef.

He swears it didn’t hurt that much. I don’t believe him. I am still in pain every time I see this photo.

We had a long day of travel the next day. Up early for breakfast, we said goodbye to the villagers that had made our trip such a success.

The team at the camp.

Saying goodbye to Mau – his efforts turned the trip from great to spectacular. I left him with my beloved Yo-zuri hat.

We took the small planes back to Sinop, then domestic flights to Brasilia where we parted ways. Fabio headed to Rio, and the New Mexico gang headed for a long overnighter that would get them home 26 hours later. I headed back to Sao Paulo for a few days of steak and caipirinhas before I went home.

Air Zaremba lands to pick us up.

My welcome back to civilization.

The view outside my room in Sao Paulo. My first trip here was in 1998, but I have no idea when my next one will be. I stayed up well into the early hours just looking out the window. It was too overcast to see the Southern Cross, but I knew it was there.

I flew home a few days later, wondering when I would get back to the Amazon, and wondering much more how 20 years had gone by so quickly. 

Steve

 

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT – THE BOOK WE ALL NEED

Several of you have still not ordered Dr. Carvalho’s outstanding new book. Get it now before the movie comes out!