One Heck Of A Ride

191 Chapter 25 A Fishing Trip I’ll Never Forget T his is a book about my experiences while hunting big game around the world, but I could not write it without mentioning my most memorable fishing trip. I made my fourth trip to South America when I traveled to Brazil with a dying friend to fish for peacock bass, a large and colorful SouthAmerican gamefish not even remotely related to the bass family that they seem to resemble. They’ve been described as “the most sought-after freshwater gamefish in the world” and “bass-like, but with a much meaner attitude.” I had bought the seven-day fishing trip for two people at the Weatherby Foundation’s annual fund-raising banquets because I thought giving the second slot to my friend Jack Webb would be a way to show him how much I appreciated our friendship. Jack was 66 years old and had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. His wife told a local newspaper reporter who wrote about our trip after we returned that she was afraid the trip was a risk he shouldn’t take. Traveling to the Amazon Basin was tiring for him, to be sure, but he told me it was an important part of the greatest adventure of his life. We flew from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles to Miami, and then on to Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas in northern Brazil, where we transferred to the domestic terminal and flew on to Barcelos where we boarded a chartered river boat. This last leg of the trip took us fifty miles up the Rio Negro, a huge branch of the Amazon River fed by dozens of tributaries. In some places, the Negro was at least twelve miles wide. Our destination was the Rio Negro Lodge, a luxury resort that Americans Phil and Ruth Marsteller had built in the Brazilian wilderness. Phil was a helicopter pilot and owner of an aircraft sales company when he discovered the Amazon and began operating the “Amazon Queen,” an 85- foot, three-story floating hotel on the Rio Negro in the early 1990s. Their thatch-roofed 5,000 square-foot lodge and private cabins came next. Their resort had been operating for ten years when we arrived in early December 2008. It may have been remote, but we definitely did not rough it while we were there. Their lodge and cabins were air-conditioned, the food was good, a generator provided electricity, each bedroom had two queen beds, and everything was clean, modern and tastefully decorated. The exotic fish in a 2,000-gallon aquarium, a pet baby tapir grazing on manicured lawns, and the views of the rainforest overlooking the river from covered porches added to the ambience. The Marstellers had a sawmill and carpenter shop on site where all of the resort’s windows and doors were made from hardwoods harvested nearby. They also had a medical and dental clinic, a library, and a school that among other studies taught indigenous people English, the language Author and a good Piranha