Fishing for Piranha - Amazon Adventures

I’ve never been very excited about the sport of fishing, but I must admit that a new element of excitement is added when the fish have giant teeth and could eat a cow down to the bone in a couple of minutes.

Roger probably wasn’t our guide’s real name.  It was probably Boola-boola or something similar, since he had grown up in one of the local villages on the Amazon River.  Roger spoke fluent English, German, Spanish, and Qechua, all self-taught, so he is a pretty smart guy.

Except perhaps, for leading a family of Gringos into the still, dark water to fish for piranhas. We had tried a couple of spots before we found a good one.

Our boat guy, Joe, cut the engine and coasted us into a quiet cove, where the water was black and silent, ominous even.  I was sure it led straight down to hell where the fish came from. He chopped up a chunk of old beef roast with a screwdriver, and insisted on baiting our hooks for us.  Seriously, Inca Joe, we’re hillbillies, my daughters need to bait their own hooks.

While normal fishing involves quiet and patience, seeking the devil fish requires none of this.  Plop the hook loaded with a piece of bloody meat into the water, then splash the water with the end of your pole, so the devil-fish think something tasty fell into the water, and wait for the fun to begin.

One can watch the meat sink slowly against the blackness, but after a couple of feet, it will pitch violently six or seven times and disappear.  The trick is, the fisherman needs to set the hook within this time frame.  There is no sitting and waiting, there is casting and the baiting of hooks.

We hadn’t had much luck with the catching part, although we were amused when a native in a dugout canoe rowed by us.  Inca Joe traded some of our bait for the temporary use of a knife to cut the rest.  The native handed back about half of what Joe offered, as it was more than he needed.  He was going to boil the Gringos in a big black pot tonight anyway.

Just when we started to run low on bait, Roger caught a couple, and both my daughters caught one on their last piece of bait.  We ended up with six, which cost us two pounds of beef - not too efficient. I was wishing I could wash the beefy blood from my hands from all the hook baiting, and started to rinse my hands in the river – but I resisted the urge - it just seemed like a bad idea.

Piranhas are not just full of teeth, but they are angry.  They will chomp over and over as they suffocate in the air, trying one last time to take a bite out of one of us.  I learned that their gums secrete an anticoagulant causing their victims to bleed more and attract more guests to the piranha party.

We returned to the lodge, where I could finally wash my hands in a sink (I did check it first), and we waited for Inca Joe and Roger to fry up the day’s catch.

These little guys are not too big, and there isn’t much meat, but what there is tastes sweet and isn’t fishy tasting.  We ate them with a side of fried yucca and rice, but it was more the idea of it than anything.

I am eating you, Mr. Piranha.  I am the top of the food chain.

Read about our adventure on Monkey island.