Jungle Fishing Misadventures 1974-2012

By Stephen Orndorf

For close to 40 years, Steve Orndorf and his brother, Dave, have traveled to the jungles of South America in the pursuit of adventure and trophy fish. While the fishing hasnt always been productive, theres been no shortage of adventures. Journeying through seven countries, theyve encountered logistical nightmares, hostile Indians, and a host of intimidating creaturespiranhas, electric eels, poison dart frogs, vampire bats, caimans, freshwater rays, snakes, bullet ants, and more.

The richly biodiverse Amazon and Orinoco River basins have served as backdrops for most of these trips. Here, a brief walk in the jungle can expose one to an astonishing array of different species, more perhaps than would be revealed in a month of walking in most parts of North America. For the Orndorf brothers, sportsfishing has opened the door to exploring this magnificent region, truly one of our planets last remaining frontiers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479734269

Stephen Orndorf

A graduate of Middlebury College and Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Business, Orndorf worked for 35 years in the steel industry before becoming a consultant for a developer in Napa, California, where he has resided with his wife, Linda, since 1980.

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Prologue

This book is about jungle fishing in the rivers of South and Central America. Over the past thirty-eight years, my brother Dave and I have been on twenty-three such fishing trips to fourteen different locations in seven countries. Along the way, we have had a number of bizarre, outlandish, and arguably dangerous encounters. A well-grounded individual might legitimately question the sanity of someone who continues to subject himself to such encounters, particularly given the expense and considerable logistical problems normally involved in getting there and back. But contrary to the opinions of some family members and many friends and associates, neither of us has a death wish, despite what I must concede is a considerable mound of evidence to that effect.

In our defense, what we have strived for on these trips is more than anything else a desire to be exposed to one of the planet’s most incredible natural environments. River fishing in particular offers a continuously unfolding panorama of one’s natural surroundings, and the sights and sounds while traveling down jungle rivers in the Amazon and Orinoco River basins are particularly striking. So much so that I have to admit that both of us have gradually become somewhat addicted to jungle fishing since our first trip to Colombia in 1974.

We’ve met a lot of interesting people during all these trips, and virtually all of them share one basic tenet—a desire to get away from the turmoil of increasingly stressful lives. The proliferation of cell phones, e-mails, and other social networking sites makes it ever more difficult to simply and quietly enjoy the natural wonders that surround us. For the most part, people we’ve met on these trips didn’t simply book a jungle fishing trip out of the blue. It was a logical step in an evolutionary process that started during their earliest exposure to the outdoors. Such was the case for my brother and me, and I thought I’d share up front how that evolution worked in our case.

Dave and I grew up in a duplex in a lower/middle-class neighborhood outside Columbus, Ohio. Our duplex was surrounded by other similar houses for distances as far as our world extended while growing up—not a park in sight. As luck would have it, however, my mother’s uncle Al owned an eleven-acre parcel outside of town on the banks of Big Walnut Creek; and my parents, brother, and I were often able to visit that property on the weekends from the spring through the fall. To my young mind, it was an amazing place, particularly the creatures that lived along and in Big Walnut Creek.

The creek ran along the entire west side of the property, and a paved public road ran along the east side. The adjoining properties to the north and south consisted of cornfields and cow grazing land. About a third of a mile to the south was a railroad bridge, and about equidistant to the north was a vehicular bridge. Those represented the boundaries beyond which I couldn’t go as a five-year-old, though my brother Dave, six years my senior, often roamed much further.

There were two gravelly roads on the property that led down to the creek, one of which had a rustic (to say the least) two-story house at its end. The house was actually constructed around a single-room structure that had previously been used as a location for voting booths for the locals. The other road led past two small separate cabins, both of which were dilapidated, and one of which was subject to the occasional flood. No one lived in any of them while I was growing up, so we had a full range of access when we were there. There was no running water—there were three hand pumps spread around the property, and I can still clearly remember using them.

The two-story house was particularly intimidating to me for a long time. The area where my brother and I slept was reached by climbing up almost vertical wooden stairs, and the walls up there had large holes where I imagined threatening animals lurked, preparing themselves to come out as soon as I fell asleep. My brother, of course, was more than happy to try to heighten my angst by conjuring up ghostly noises and telling scary stories as soon as the lights went out. My reticence about sleeping up there wasn’t helped by the fact that my mother’s father, Sylvester, had a heart attack and died downstairs one night during a violent thunderstorm just as we went to bed. There were no telephones to call for help, and I could clearly hear that something really bad was going on down there. That incident is the earliest memory that I have.

Another intimidating aspect of the property was the existence of a real-life human skeleton that hung in the barn outside the two-story house. I never did learn where it came from, but it added to the adventure of visiting the place on the weekends.

Great-Uncle Al was a real character. An appraiser by trade, he was never married. He lived in an apartment in downtown Columbus about a block from where he had what passed for his office. He could regularly be seen there with his feet up on a disorganized-looking desk. It was a single room with a potbellied stove in the middle. He was a liberal political activist of sorts and took under his wing an incredible assemblage of misfits that were always huddling around the stove in the wintertime. I don’t have a clue what any of their real names were, but they had an incredible array of nicknames—Gabby, Tin Can, Slewfoot, and One-eye. I can attest to the fact that the latter two nicknames were right on the money. I don’t think any of them had a job, though Uncle Al (we never called him Great-Uncle Al) often had them come to the Big Walnut property to help in tending the tomato and corn crops, which rapidly became favorites of mine. Uncle Al seemed to like nicknames, and he came up with two for my brother and me. I was piss-ass, and he was pee-eye. While demeaning, they nonetheless were deemed by us to be preferable to those bestowed upon us by our mother—poba for me and bumbernickel for Dave—monikers of equally nebulous origins, but for us, far more embarrassing when in the company of friends.

One Sunday or so a month during the growing season, Uncle Al’s well-to-do banker brother Ray and his wife Bess would visit the property to pick up vegetables. They came straight from church and were dressed as a churchgoing banker family is expected to dress. They visually seemed very much out of place with Uncle Al and his friends, to say nothing of Dave and myself, who were generally covered with varying degrees of dirt and/or mud. Nonetheless, Dave and I welcomed them with open arms, as they always had a bag of candy with them when they arrived.

Exploring this property on Big Walnut Creek was the beginning of my love for being outdoors, and it had the same effect on Dave. There always seemed to be rabbits, pheasants, deer, raccoons, skunks, possums, or some form of animal roaming the property. Songbirds, raptors, and owls were abundant. At night, we’d listen to the bullfrogs and watch the fireflies while sitting around the rock fireplace outside the house roasting marshmallows.

Most of our attention centered on the creek itself. A good section of the property had a series of stone steps about six inches wide and deep running steeply down the bank to the creek from a height of perhaps eight feet. There was a very rudimentary dock at the bottom. While a lot of time was spent simply fishing from the stairs or the dock, Dave and I ultimately explored every inch of the creek from bridge to bridge, and in Dave’s case, beyond.

There was a gigantic population of crawdads, and we learned early on what great bait the crawdad tails were for the bluegill, sunfish, and rock bass. The prized full-sized soft craws were dynamite for the smallmouth bass. One of our greatest thrills was to drape trotlines across the creek (about seventy-five feet wide). We’d place one-foot-long drop lines with night crawlers about every six feet. Part of the fun was collecting the night crawlers—we’d flood an area at night with water and a creosote solution, which chased them partway out of their holes, where we’d snatch them and place them in tin cans for use on the trotlines. We couldn’t wait to investigate the trotline each morning to see what was caught—usually a catfish or two.

There were also a lot of carp in the creek—I remember my dad catching a couple of twenty pounders in one day from the top of the stone stairs. At my age they looked enormous. Also, after a while, we got adept at snagging the garfish that would slowly float up to the top to languish in the sun on warm days. We gradually learned that they would actually hit lures if swung right in front of them.

It wasn’t all just about the fish in the creek, though. A lot of bullfrogs lived there as well, and they didn’t escape our attention. We’d go out at night and gig them, and more than a few frog legs hit the frying pan, at least one of which I recall jumping out of the pan while being cooked! There were also turtles languishing or swimming around—painted, soft shell, and the intimidating snappers.

At an early age, Dave became transfixed by snakes, and there was an incredibly large population of garter and water snakes in and around Big Walnut. This fixation ultimately translated into collecting copperheads and rattlesnakes when Dave graduated from college.

We also didn’t hesitate to help ourselves to the edible mushrooms that were fairly common around the property. Somehow we never seemed to get sick from eating them.

While Dave and I were still very young, our family started taking a vacation each year to an area in lower Michigan close to Muskegon. We usually left by car at night after our father got home from work, and my brother and I both slept in the back, Dave on the seat itself and me on a makeshift wooden insert that fit on the floor between the front and back seats. These trips allowed us to expand our outdoor and fishing horizons. We could now fish for northern pike and walleyes, and there were a few small streams that held native brook trout. I don’t remember any of the latter being over eight inches long, but our opportunities to explore were greatly expanded, and we spent almost all of our time doing just that.

Finally, our dad booked a trip to a real fishing lodge on the French River in Ontario, which flows into Lake Nippissing. The place was called Lunge Lodge (for muskellunge or Muskie, of which I only caught two or three in a number of trips there). One accessed the lodge by boarding a large paddlewheel boat, the Chief Comanda, in North Bay, Ontario. The boat traversed the entire length of Lake Nippissing and then journeyed upstream a number of miles to the lodge.

One of my most vivid memories of the place was the owner, Bert, who unrelentingly played the organ while dinner was served each night. That knocked a couple of points off of the adventure scale, but Dave and I had now at least graduated to fishing in Canada. Like many places in Ontario, the quarries on the French River consisted of small and largemouth bass, walleye, northern pike, and the aforementioned muskies. We weren’t purists. We caught bass using live frogs as bait, and we hooked small yellow perch in the back and tossed them out under bobbers for the pike (I think that was legal at the time, but can’t say for sure). With the northern pike, you had to let them take a lot of line out to make sure you could successfully set the hook, and I vividly remember the excited anticipation while watching the cork slowly meandering away two or three feet down in the crystal clear water.

While at Lunge Lodge, we got wind of a more remote fishing lodge just across the border from Ontario in Quebec. The place was called La Reserve Beauchene. We booked a trip there, and we fell in love with the place from the beginning. Beauchene is an expansive series of dozens of lakes and interconnecting streams that ultimately flow into the Ottawa River. The main lake and many of the smaller lakes were stocked with smallmouth bass in the 1920s, and the average smallmouth size at Beauchene was much bigger than anything we had seen before. We kept elaborate statistics for a number of years, weighing each bass and tagging many, a host of which were recaught later, thereby providing some interesting information for someone in a rapidly advancing state of fishing addiction. One year, our average size for smallmouth was three pounds, four ounces. Beauchene also offers very large (read five—to six-pound) brook trout, as well as lake trout, northern pike, walleye, and whitefish. Dave and I and a few friends have been going to Beauchene for over thirty years now and are still mesmerized by the quiet isolation and the calming combination of granite, trees, crystal clear water, loons, moose, beaver, and other wildlife. Beauchene was my first real exposure to a place that might be described as wilderness.

Over the years, our Canadian trips expanded to include trips to lodges in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, almost all of which were accessed by floatplanes. I was also able to squeeze a trip in to Kodiak Island in Alaska, where three other friends and I stayed in U.S. Forest Service cabins. We were terrorized by grizzly bears on a daily basis while there, and the salmon were so thick in the nearby streams that it was almost impossible to fish. The infamous call of the wild was nonetheless gradually taking hold, and it was just a matter of time until the allure of jungle fishing became irresistible.

My brother and I have always had a drive to see what was around the next bend in the river or beyond the furthest visible point in the lake. It didn’t make any difference if the fishing was fabulous right by the road or right next to the dock. We wanted to explore and to go where there wouldn’t be other people around (or their possessions) to clutter up the surroundings.

I’ve been fishing the small trout streams near Truckee in the Sierra Nevada for over thirty years now, and I almost always make it a point to walk for an hour from wherever I’m parked before I start to fish. Few fishermen seem willing to expend even that much effort, though that should hardly come as a surprise in this age where instant gratification seems to have become the norm. Ultimately, for my brother and me, the next bend in the river and the best opportunity to leave humanity behind became the jungles of South America, where we instinctively knew we’d be exposed to true wilderness.

I feel a need to explain up front that it’s never really been all about the simple act of fishing. When people seem bemused by all the time I spend fishing (I have lived in Napa, California, since 1980, and these days regularly fish for striped bass in the Napa River over sixty times a year), I explain to them (usually with marginal success) that catching fish is simply an activity that can occupy your time while you’re enjoying the natural surroundings. In the Napa River, it’s mostly the birdlife—herons, egrets, black-necked stilts, willets, avocets, curlews, godwits, rails, pelicans, hawks, kites, osprey, an occasional mute swan, and multitudes of ducks and geese. A friend and I recently saw a peregrine falcon behead a green-winged teal a short distance from our boat while on the river. Otters are frequently encountered maneuvering around the shoreline, and each fall, a sea lion or two will wander up from San Francisco Bay to pick off the salmon that come up the river to spawn.

While the Napa River has an incredible array of wildlife, it obviously in no way could be considered wilderness. Along the same lines, I’m not sure I could describe our beloved Lake Beauchene in Quebec to be true wilderness anymore; after all, you can drive there in a car, and over the years a number of vacation cabins have slowly been constructed along the shorelines.

And so, for my brother and me, the search for wilderness fishing inexorably led to the South American jungles, where we were convinced we could find solitude and adventure.

Everyone probably has his own personal interpretation of what constitutes wilderness. In his book Down the River, which covers a rafting trip down the Colorado River just before the Glen Canyon Dam was constructed, the famous anarchist and environmental zealot Edward Abbey shared his thoughts on the topic: Wilderness—we scarcely know what we mean by the thing, while the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination. The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need—if only we had the eyes to see.

For Abbey, the biologically simplistic desert southwest served as a sublime example of wilderness. The jungles of South America represent wilderness at its opposite biological extreme. If you’re into exploring nature, you simply cannot find an area with more to offer.

The abundance of life forms is staggering. There are mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and more in numbers and variety almost difficult to comprehend. The Amazon forest is probably this planet’s best example of biological diversity. In his book A Land of Ghosts, biologist David G. Campbell states that the Amazon Valley, in fact, has more species than have ever existed anywhere at any time during the four-billion-year history of life on Earth. Campbell and his associates studied in detail and over an extended period of time the plant life in an eighteen-hectare (about forty-five acre) section of one of the Amazon River’s many tributaries and describes the results of the study—That small area seems a universe to me. Its diversity is stunning: more than 20,000 individual trees belonging to about 2,000 species—three times as many tree species as there are in all of North America. And each tree is an ecosystem unto itself, bearing fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, aerophytes, orchids, lianas, reptiles, mammals, birds, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, mites and uncountable legions of insects. The number of insect species alone—especially beetles—may exceed the combined total of all other species of plants and animals in the forest.

Then there’s the fish species to be considered. In Canada or the United States, the number of freshwater species that might be considered sport fish is relatively limited. At Lake Beauchene in Quebec, we aspire each year to catch the six species that are offered—smallmouth bass, walleye, northern pike, lake trout, whitefish, and brook trout. This represents a fairly large population of choices compared to many other destinations in North America, and in fact, this variety of species is one of the reasons that we continue to go back there each year. On my home turf in the Napa River, 99 percent of the fish that I have caught are striped bass, though I haven’t really tried to catch the sturgeon, the only other available species of any consequence. Most warm water anglers in North America pursue the largemouth or smallmouth bass to the exclusion of other species. In colder streams, there are usually only one or two kinds of trout available. In Alaska, it’s mostly about the salmon. As you might guess, however, South American rivers offer up a cornucopia of species to pursue.

The Amazon River basin contains thousands of tributaries and encompasses 20 percent of the entire world’s freshwater. An estimated two thousand five hundred species of fish have been identified there to date, and there are no doubt additional species yet to be discovered. Many of them will readily take a lure or a fly.

Most South American jungle fishing has been directed toward the peacock bass and the payara. With good reason, as they are both beautiful creatures that just happen to be spectacular game fish. They have to compete, though, with other tremendous fighters—the bicuda and trairao among my two favorites. There are the infamous and ubiquitous piranhas. Hundreds of species of catfish exist, and they grow to incredibly impressive sizes. It is truly a fisherman’s paradise.

I learned fairly quickly that while biological diversity may be a major attraction for me, most people quickly lose interest when talking about how many tree species might exist in the Rio Negro River basin or how big the payara get to be in the Orinoco River. I suppose when your outdoor experiences are by necessity or by choice limited to taking the dog for a walk in the local park or laying on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, you really don’t have much interest in such esoteric biological minutia. But turn the topic to the more sensational—the piranhas, the anacondas, the electric eels—the interest level escalates rapidly.

In recognition of that fact, most of the attention here will be given to encounters with the perceived dangers of spending time fishing in the jungle. I use the word perceived because most of these dangers have been greatly sensationalized (a good recent example is the popular Discovery Channel show River Monsters wherein in one episode the fierce-looking and aggressive trairao is touted as the Jungle Killer, implying that to wade into the river in their proximity is tantamount to sprinting across a freeway in rush hour traffic). While it would be foolish to ignore the many dangers that realistically do in fact exist in remote jungle areas, in our many trips, we haven’t suffered any serious consequences, though there certainly have been a few close calls.

I am not immune to the lure of sensationalism, however. A few years ago, I briefly made the circuit in the local Kiwanis and Rotary clubs (I have been a Rotarian for almost thirty years) with a PowerPoint presentation on the top ten dangers associated with fishing in the jungles of South America. With apologies in advance to more scientifically knowledgeable experts, and with the full recognition of the arbitrary nature of my decision making, the list goes as follows: (10) bullet ant, (9) giant catfish, (8) poison dart frogs, (7) electric eel, (6) caiman, (5) jaguar, (4) piranha, (3) snakes (2) freshwater ray, and (1) disease-carrying insects. For a while, in the interest of maximum hype, I actually ended my presentations with the now increasingly famous (or infamous) candiru, the miniature catfish that has been known (on very rare occasions) to swim up a man’s penis by honing in on the urine flow if the poor sap were to pee while standing in the river (in yet another River Monsters episode, a victim of the candiru is led back to a museum vile in which the specimen was placed after its removal in surgery. He is asked if he would like to hold it in his hands, and he sheepishly replies "no, signor). At the time I was making the service club rounds, the candiru hadn’t achieved much notoriety, and no one really believed me. In any case, I ultimately decided to drop the reference, as it didn’t prove to be an altogether appealing topic at Kiwanis and Rotary meetings; at the end of one breakfast meeting, a fellow Rotarian yelled out check please" while I was providing the candiru details.

My top ten list includes only what one is exposed to upon arrival at one’s destination. The logistics of actually getting there have proven to be equally if not more troublesome, as will become apparent. Many of those logistical problems occurred back in the earlier trips, but even today, getting to the remote regions of the Amazon and Orinoco River basins can prove arduous or even downright hazardous.

Our South American fishing adventures, or more appropriately misadventures, started with a 1974 trip to the Vaupes River in Colombia.

El Dorado Lodge—Vaupes River—Colombia—January 1974

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was very little