Thursday, December 1, 2011

On the Way

The long journey has begun. I’m presently at the San Francisco airport en route to the Amazon. It was a snowy windy night in Victor, Idaho. My flight left Idaho Falls at 6 AM. Needless to say I couldn’t sleep to well worrying about the morning road conditions and the fact that I had to leave my house by 3 AM. As expected, the roads were treacherous all the way to the airport and it was a good thing I gave myself some extra time.


The flight from IF to San Fran was a cake walk and my next jump is to Houston. My younger sister Becky is on this Amazon trip so I will meet her in Houston and tonight we fly together to San Paulo, Brazil. We’ll get in around 11 AM tomorrow morning. We have most of the day to kill there before we fly up to Manaus, Brazil and sleep there and meet up with my group. Then Saturday we take the bush flight into the Xeurini River.


Fishing conditions look to be difficult. It’s unfortunate because I have a great group of folks. In fact, this is the group I was taking last March and we had to reschedule at the last minute because of flood conditions. Anyhow, water levels are high but not enough to cancel again thank goodness.


It’s been a challenging year in the Amazon. Many trips have suffered the consequence of high water. What it adds up to is far less fish caught overall because the fish can literally swim deep into the rainforest where boats can’t reach them. And you don’t exactly wade around in the Amazon. The blame goes on El Nino causing far more moisture than normal.


We’ll give it our best. I should note that catfishing is supposed to be excellent during high water. The Amazon has some of the world’s largest and most amazing looking catfish imaginable. You can expect I’ll be dunking a piranha at least a few times this week.


As always I will report about each and every day of the adventure. However it’s likely I will not have much internet access until after the trip. Stay tuned – this is going to be interesting!


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