Peacock Bass Fishing - Brazil

In 2009, I traveled to the Rio Negro River in Brazil with the Costa team to go peacock bass fishing for a series called Bass Life. We flew into Manaus and took some time to ride around town and explore. From there, we took a puddle jumper to the middle of the rainforest. Being from a small and being pretty fresh in my career, I really hadn’t traveled much. This was the first time I had ever even needed a passport.

The puddle jumper took us to our boat for the journey. That’s where we ate (I lived mostly off the rice and beans only) and slept. The boat pulled little boats behind us that we used by day to go fishing in. A lot of our time on our day trips was spent swinging machetes to chop limbs and trees that blocked the river from where we wanted to go. It was definitely worth it because we caught the crap out of them on topwater. My biggest fish may not have broken 20 lbs but the fish are fun to fight and pretty to look at.

I got to meet some cool people on the trip - two being a a father/son duo from Tulsa named Stokely, who I since had dinner with one year while we were in Tulsa for a Classic. Two other cool people I got to travel with were two guys from our Costa team - Steve Mick on videography and Costa’s Creative Director, Tim Cole, on photography.

One of the coolest parts of our trip was when we stopped at little island village in the middle of the jungle where the locals lived in handmade huts with dirt floors. They had a generator that they turned on for an hour each night to watch soap operas. It was the 10 most adventurous days I’ve ever had in my life. It’s amazing to be somewhere across the world, speaking different languages but you all understand each other’s common love of fishing.