So the next morning, now with a better plan, Myself, Pelado and Karim set out for a part of the river with a lot of twists and turns. A place Pelado and Doca discussed as a possible place for more of these lagoons. The plan was to beach the boat and send up the drone and basically take a look around. Morning turned out to be the best time for the elevated wind channels and the light conditions. That day we found 9 lagoons and managed to get to 6 of them and out of those 6, 4 for sure had fish in them and were large enough to fish. The plan had some challenges. There were no paths to get to these lakes because they had never even been seen before. The thickness of the jungle surrounding them was sometimes a problem. Also once we got there finding a place with enough room to “test the waters” from shore was a challenge for some of them. So we ended up having to use a baitcasting reel and some top water lures to check them out. I must say that was fun as hell. Watching a Peacock Bass that had never seen an artificial lure before, blow up on a topwater bait was an adrenaline jolt to the system.
We mapped, flew the drone, hiked in the jungle, fished for pretty much all day that day. The next morning we once again pushed a couple boats into a lagoon and sent our anglers into the unknown waters. This was so much fun and the reality of what we were doing was getting us more excited with every flight of the drone.
Later that morning we found a very large lagoon a bit further from the river. This one was almost twice as far from the river bank than most of the rest. But it looked awesome. So we sent the search party in. We walked and walked and occasionally marked a tree or two with the machete like leaving some bread crumbs to find our way back. The jungle there was thick and had a few old creek bottoms that were marshy and the landscape was different it seemed with every step. Maybe 45 minutes went by and we had still not found this huge lake. Pelado starts to get a little frustrated and finally we stop and discuss a new plan to go back to the boat and fly the drone again to see what we had done wrong.