Re: Hooks for Peacocks

Posted by Peter Gorinsky on 2012-03-27 21:59:33 in reply to Re: Hooks for Peacocks posted by Dan Blanton on 2012-03-27 02:38:36

Dan, these are an actual string of lakes with each lake having a different name ... they are all known to be part of the Juma Lake Reservation complex. Once in Manaus, the camp contact meets the client at the airport and drives to join the ferry that travels by the `meeting of the waters´ and connects with the mini-bus that then drives for an hour to meet the transport boat that continues to the Juma Lodge. This all takes about three hours and is a very comfortable destination to reach. The Juma Lodge is mainly an eco-lodge with clients originating mainly from Europe. The angling tourism is not at all developed and there are limitations on available boats and guides. However, it is great having all this productive water to fish in and not be bothered by boat traffic. Some lakes offered excellent arawana fly fishing with additional smaller butterfly peacock bass and triara. Other larger and deeper lakes offered larger peacock bass to the 18 lb. sizes ... my biggest. I will be returning there at the end of August or beginning of September when I am told that the fishing is excellent and even though the water level is higher, the fish are much more aggressive with clearer fresher water. During my stay there I was able to promote flyfishing and train some of the guides for future angling trips. After my two weeks in the Juma Lake area, I headed across to Guyana to fish in the lakes of the Rupununi savanna that were drying out during December and January months. Here I also had a lot of success with large 8 lb. butterfly peacock bass - Lukanani in Guyana - that we encountered in large schools within the Simoni Lakes. There were also a number of large arawana and in one small lake, a very aggressive school of adult arapaima. It was also possible to later fish the Guyana coastal waters for butterfly peacock bass and juvenile tarpon. After three months fly fishing the Amazon headwaters I returned to Costa Rica to begin our fishing season here and it has been very good so far. The freshwater flyfishing in these Amazon waters offered me a good chance to try different fly patterns and hooks. My conclusion is that they all worked well and in some waters, the jig hook fly was a definite advantage when fishing over subsurface structure. I had a good chance to use up a load of old hooks and the pirana sure guaranteed that many of them had to be redressed for future use. Like you, I changed rods from the 10 wt. TFO to a 9 wt. and this made for comfortable fishing and actually higher hook-ups with generally less hook damage. I was fortunate to be able to relive some of my flyfishing experiences that began some 54 years ago when I undertook expeditions to fly fish for so many of these exotic tropical fish. They are all still there.

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