Series on Fishing Venezuela
We recently toured Venezuela on a fishing expedition and crossed the country by car and truck, all the way from the beach at Caracas Airport down close to the Columbian border. Our hosts, mostly Italian farmers and ranchers whose families settled here more than 50 years ago, knew just where to stop for good food. Or gasoline, which is now roughly six cents a gallon.
Venezuela is simply a different program from North America. Here, there are no highway speed limits. That means no speed traps. You can drink and drive, don’t need a driver license (or driver’s ed), and red lights only mean there are intersections ahead. So we breezed through every red light in cities and towns, which was fun. We even saw a city bus passing slower traffic at 40 mph on a narrow shoulder of the highway, which was cool, as long as you had several Polar beers close at hand, to remain calm. Our driver John Richard (no relation) didn’t drink and drive and was rock-steady, which was good. But John has a wilder side; this quiet guy has base-jumped from skyscraper buildings in Caracas and also Angel Falls, at 3,000 feet the highest waterfall in the world—-which we hope to visit next trip.
In the cities, cars around us were often inches away, but you never saw a collision; there was this invisible cushion between every vehicle. If an old battered truck pulled out in front of you, maybe loaded with cow heads piled high, nobody honked at the sudden slow-down. Drivers here seem more patient, immune to road-rage.
We stayed mostly in Calabozo in the north/central part of Venezula, where the nation’s fifth and final big bass tournament was about to be held, and year’s best angler awarded. It’s a somewhat gritty town surrounded by flat rice farm and cattle country, with a reservoir of about 80 square miles, with sturdy tropical timber still standing in water after being flooded for 47 years. It’s a handy place for locals to swim and fish for dinner, right on the edge of town. The cruel, red-bellied piranha, which used to kill people in this very lake 20 years ago, are now somewhat controlled by peacock bass, which apparently are even meaner. Hot work on the lake: Around here, temperatures almost always hover around 90 degrees at mid-day. There are no real seasons except wet and dry. The dry season had just begun and the wet season had proved a disappointment. That’s not good, when the reservoirs are lower and you depend on them all around the country for electrical power.
As hosts for the bass tournament, our friends were well-positioned. Their Italian Club was built many years before and, outdoors around a huge pool, could sit and feed a few hundred people. Their restaurant on the highway outside carried dishes straight out of Italy, simply fabulous. But there was prep work to be done, before fishermen with 70 boats arrived from all over the country. While we three Americans pre-fished the lake most of three days, our hosts were prepping food and typing up loose ends, so to speak. There was 30 kilos of Mozzarella cheese to prepare, at a local shop that specializes in this very cheese. Stopping there for a look, we were offered big chunks of cheese that were still hot.
We toured the slaughterhouse nearby, with grim work going on inside with saws and knives. Outside, an old man, with a shocker device (plugged into the wall) let out a cowboy yell, poked away, and sent each cow scrambling up the chute, which was a one-way ticket. Perhaps three Army officers kept track of the paperwork or visually checked the cows.
We then drove across Lake Calabozo’s earthen dam that must be eight miles long, out to a ranch in the country, with our friend John D. driving. That’s where three ranch hands loaded three hand-picked Brahma cows into the back of our diesel truck. Cowboys loaded up the cows, while we piled out and fished a pond that carried scrappy peacock bass. On a vast expanse of land under a breathless, blue sky that seldom changed.
In the truck on the levee above us, the three Brahma cows earned one extra hour of life, gazing out over the pastures they’d grown up in, while we fished. Then it was off to the slaughterhouse before sunset. When I saw those three cows the next day, they were quartered and sizzling, propped up next to open-wood fires at the Club. With hundreds of tired, hungry fishermen gathering in line. But that was next day…
I’ll get to the fishing we did in Venezuela (which was extensive) in the next few blog posts. It will include the bass tournament we three American gringos competed in. Also the great awards ceremony afterwards, and then our road trip almost to the Columbian border—-where we slept in hammocks at a tiny fish camp in huge Cinaruco-Capanaparo National Park, in Apure state. That’s where our hunger for action, after days of tough reservoir fishing in murky water, collided head-on with hungry, brutal peacock bass that likely had never seen a fishing lure.
More photos from this trip can be viewed on Seafavorites at the following page:
http://seafavorites.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=269_270
