Fishing for Notorious Piranha Along the Amazon River

Days 13 & 14, 2024 Grand World Voyage

Monday and Tuesday, Jan. 15-16, 2024; Parintins and Santarém, Brazil

I’ve always believed that success in fishing is mostly a matter of luck. After today I think experience must play a role. As we all were dropping lines with raw meat on a hook into a small tributary, it was mostly the boat’s crew who caught the piranhas.

We were lucky on our boat, as one passenger caught a small piranha in addition to the three or four caught by the crew. Of course, we all posed as if we had caught them ourselves. Most of the boats around us had no luck. My friend Monika did catch a nice sized catfish (although nothing like the one in yesterday’s blog).

The fishing gene must have skipped over me. As a child and teen I spent many early hours fishing with my grandfather for bass, bream and crappie on an Arkansas lake. Never caught a thing, which I know disappointed him immensely. I didn’t mind so much, as I enjoyed the time with him. Perhaps that is where my love for boats started, too.

Today was the final of five ports along the Amazon River. The mid-sized city of Santarém is about halfway up the river to Manaus, and is “just around the corner” from our first port, Alter do Chao. Its location at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers makes Santarém a center of transportation.

We anchored once again, but this time a barge platform came alongside for the day, making the transition easy to tenders and even larger boats like ours.

Our half-day tour took us to Maica Lake, really just a stream in a floodplain. I think the whole Amazon is a floodplain. We saw many houses on stilts, and when the river really rises, they are underwater. Our guide said many are what we would call fishing shacks – not primary homes. My tracking app didn’t even register the small stream, but it does show how close we were to the city.

Along the way we caught fleeting glimpses of dolphins, and I actually got a picture of one. As we slowly motored up the stream, we came across a herd of water buffalo as well as cattle. The tougher hide of the water buffalo helps to protect them from the teeth of the tiny piranha.

For those who wanted to go ashore on their own, the ship offered a shuttle service to a shopping area along the waterfront. The most popular purchase was Havaiana flip flops, which cost about a quarter as much as back home. Everyone here on the Amazon lives in flip flops, it seems.

I was too lazy to make the final Amazon River sail-away – five straight port days left us all looking forward to relaxing over the next three sea days. The Oi Brazil team is still on board and performed in the World Theater tonight, with cruise director Kimberly joining in for the finale (green and gold skirt).

Yesterday we visited Parintins, where the main attraction is the Boi-Bumbá show. It is a small sample of the Festival do Boi-Bumbá, second only to Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival in size. I wrote about it last month, so instead I set off walking. My destination was the Bumbódromo, a 35,000-seat stadium built in the shape of a bull’s head.

After reaching the cathedral I thought I would cut through the cemetery to reach the stadium, but couldn’t find an exit through the stone walls. That was okay – I enjoyed wandering through the plots in the shade of trees. There were too many young deaths, though.

As during my previous visit, the Sea Scouts of Parintins were out in force offering any assistance we needed.