By Dr. Peter Brookes
The sun was sagging on the horizon of the Parana—South America’s second-longest river—when a bulge of tea-stained water pushed out from the rocky bank and rolled in the direction of my fly.
With a 7-weight fly rod tucked under my arm, I was ripping a 6-inch black and red Andino Deceiver fly hand-over-hand when the 2/0-sized hook came to an abrupt stop a few feet from the shore.
In the fading light upriver from Itati, Argentina, I couldn’t tell if I’d snagged wood or our intended quarry, the prized golden dorado (salminus brasiliensis). But as our SET Fly Fishing guides had hammered into us all week in both English (and Spanglish):
“Keep stripping!” or “!Sigue streeeeping!”
The point is the golden dorado is an apex predator that will chase a fly a good distance, repeatedly striking it for a chance at a meal. The guides also drilled into us the necessity to “!Clava fuerte!” (“Set the hook hard!”) if we connected with a boney-mouthed dorado.
An Upper Parana sunset
So I did as I’d been told—stripping the fly as fast as I could with two hands—trying to stay tight to the fish as the torpedo-like wave of water surged straight at the boat. I braced myself mentally for the disappointment of the fly popping loose and the line going slack.
Instead, as if it suddenly sensed the boat, the fish blew past the stern and headed into the current, finally giving me a New York minute to get the rod out from under my right arm and into my right hand.
With a little extra muscle on the fish from the spine of a slightly raised fly rod, I was able to start playing the pez grande.
I worked feverishly to clear the line at my feet and get the fish on the reel. Feeling the tension, the dorado answered with a blistering run downriver like an Olympic sprinter, putting the tight-dragged reel into the backing.
The golden dorado
Unhappy with a sharp hook in its concrete-hard mouth, the dorado made several circus-like jumps accompanied by violent head shakes and muscular tail wags to free itself, its yellow scales glinting in the fading light of Northeast Argentina.
The guide gasped: “Big dorado…more than 20 pounds!”
After two days working the Parana’s big waters without much to show for it, I wanted—I needed—this fish. My right shoulder was already fried from several days of heaving tropical sinking lines and big, air-resistant flies.
I wanted redemption, if not revenge, from this dorado dry streak.
The river’s 3-6 knot current didn’t make the fight with the golden fish any easier. El tigre del rio doesn’t tire or surrender easily; they’re full of fight. Battling one makes you question your rod, reel, knots–and sometimes your life choices.
About ten minutes into the fight, my forearm and bicep were throbbing–like I’d just finished a gym workout. After fifteen minutes of a standoff with this bull of a fish, I finally coaxed the dorado grande out of the main current and into the softer water between the boat and the island we’d been fishing along.
I felt more like a dorado wrangler than a dorado angler!
The 7-weight rod groaned as I strained to maneuver the muscular dorado around the boat’s large outboard motor. I prayed the 40-lb. fluorocarbon leader and wire bit tippet would hold as the dorado macho made several attempts to go under the boat.
I’d never broken a rod before and worried this might be the first.
The guide made his first swipe with the net–whiff. The 10-12 year-old fish wasn’t ready and bulldogged deep and away from the boat. A second attempt: fish in, fish out. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead despite the oncoming coolness of the evening air.
The third netting attempt–success! We boated the behemoth.
The Parana’s apex piscatorial predator
We whooped, fist-bumped, and scrambled for cell phones as the last light drained from the late spring sky. I’d hooked the dorado of a lifetime at the exact moment I was ready to quit casting for the day. Of course, fly fishing is like that.
An 11th-hour miracle cast and hookup isn’t rare at all in this sport–the stories are many and often legendary–but it’s part of the mystery and magic that keeps anglers coming back to try to fool a fish with a fly.
The dorado was an exclamation point on a terrific trip to Argentina’s Corriente Province with SET Fly Fishing–a journey that began a few days earlier 100-miles from the Upper Parana in the peaceful, subtropical wilderness of Ibera National Park.
The Ibera (“shining water” in the local Guarani language) is one of the world’s largest freshwater marshes. It’s a mosaic of broad, open lagoons stitched together with skiff-wide channels that snake through islands of deep-green floating vegetation.
The water is crystal clear and the takes are often visible and exhilarating.
SET’s base of operation in the wetlands is the La Alondrai Lodge near Concepcion. For fishing, we split time in the marsh between a small island lodge and a platform camp tucked deeper into the park.
The sunrises and sunsets on the wetlands were stunning; the stars at night–with no light pollution for miles–were unforgettable.
An Ibera Wetlands sunset
The Ibera is a perfect warm-up for first-time dorado anglers before hitting the bigger fish on the Parana. While dorado is a tough sport fish at any size, you’ll get lots of reps in the marsh with “starter” dorado, as I called them.
When I say “starter,” I mean feisty 2-pounders with shoulders that’ll help you dial in the distance and accuracy of your casting and remind you–if needed–to stop trout-setting when you hookup with this flaxen-colored fish.
A “starter” dorado
While there are plenty of “smaller” fish, there are bigger dorado in the marsh, too.
A 6-pound dorado gordo smashed my fly in one of the narrow, braided channels not far from our polled skiff, charging out from the edge of the vegetation mat to the middle of the waterway like it owned the place.
A feisty marsh dorado
I can still picture the grab.
And then there were the palometas–dark-colored, razor-toothed cousins of the infamous piranha of adventure movie fame. These bycatch fish don’t nibble. With small mouths and sharp teeth, they often strike their prey’s underbelly with devastating effects.
Watch your flies–and your fingers
When in palometa waters, stock your fly box deep because a hookup almost always means a shredded pattern–and the need for a new fly. I watched a palometa slice through the tail of a fly, leaving the red and black feathers gently floating on the water’s surface; the cut was that clean.
One angler in our group hooked a dorado and noticed as he brought it closer to the boat that two palometas were latched onto the fish’s dorsal fins like unwelcomed hitchhikers. He added that he actually saw a third palometa biting at the dorado’s tail!
The two attackers dropped off only when the guide moved to net the dorado.
When the fishing slowed in the middle of the day, the wetlands filled the pause with the sights and sound of its wonderful wildlife: grazing capybaras the size of large dogs, prehistoric-looking caiman lounging in the sun, and noisy chaha marsh turkeys calling to one another.
The capybara: the world’s largest rodent
The Ibera is one of South America’s top wildlife-watching destinations.
The food, service, and accommodations at La Alondrai and Itati lodges and camps throughout the trip were excelente. I joked with fellow anglers that you could have anything you wanted to eat in Argentina as long as it was beef, giving a well-deserved hat tip to the country’s culinary and cattle industry.
Being a fan of American cowboy culture, it was wonderful to see Argentinian gauchos on horseback working cattle in their Basque-inspired boinas hats.
And while the Argentinian beef was a not-to-be-missed treat, we enjoyed a variety of meals at all of SET’s lodges and camps, including pacu, a delicious, local fish that is often found in Argentina’s rice fields.
Wetting a line in both the Ibera wetlands and the Parana River with SET Fly Fishing for six days this fall (their spring) offered an unforgettable look into Argentina’s best dorado waters–and maybe all of South America’s.
Not to mention that dorado trofeo (trophy dorado) I battled.
Dorado fishing set a pretty high bar for pesca con mosca trips, but from what I’m hearing about numbers and size of the brown and rainbow trout in Southern Argentina, Patagonia just might be the next trip on my angling bucket list.
Dr. Peter Brookes is an award-winning outdoor writer from Virginia. Connect at brookesoutdoors@aol.com
