As we approached the first, Bertie told me to get my rod ready. With shaking hands, I managed to tie on a new fly, a small tan shrimp pattern that I had had a lot of luck with previously and stripped some line off of the reel. I sat there waiting. Finally we came to a clearing in the jungle waters and I started to cast. There was not a lot of room for a backcast and the jungle canopy above us blocked out much of the light that I could use for sight fishing. I picked a tree to the side of us that had another small canal like passage running beside and began to roll cast out to it. The sound of the flyline cutting through the air in the otherwise still and silent jungle was like a whip cutting through the air, or the sound of the leather straps the Indians used to throw rocks with many moons ago. The sound of the bugs came from nowhere like voices from the past, busy voices that chastised and laid blame. I was terrified. I could hear the beating of the drums, loud and steady, first slowly, but as the seconds passed, they became faster and faster. The beat of the drums coursed through my body, I could feel each beat resonate through me. The screaming began, a voice as mystical as any I could have imagined, her cries ululating with the drums in a way that I knew a ritual was being performed somewhere nearby. I could feel the stinging hot coals on my body and found myself right in the middle of it all. I could almost see her there, dressed in her native attire, the men off to the side beating on the drums, beating and beating, harder and faster, harder and faster and I could feel the heat of the fire and the coals as they flew out of the fire and landed on my skin. I could hear Bertie in the distance calling my name, Tammy… Tammy… TAMMY!!! What??? I replied… And I was brought back to reality and the jungle passage that I was in. I had a fish on. The beating of the drums was no more than the beating of my own heart as a large guapote took off down the creek like waterway with my fly, the screaming of the reel was the cries of the woman and the bugs eating away at my body the burning coals. I would be ok.

It was too late for the guapote, though. I came out of the trance far too late to have any chance of landing it. He had run far enough down the passage and wrapped me around enough logs that even with the 30-lb tippet I was using; I did not stand a chance. I broke him off and Bertie looked at me and asked me where in the hell I was at when that thing took off. He told me about how big it was, and how I had just stood there, as if off in another world and just let him go. He did not chastise, that is not his style, but he certainly wondered. Jaime just looked at me. I looked back at him and raised one eyebrow as if to question it all. He simply nodded his head once and we were off to the next small opening.

We fished like that for nearly two hours, each taking an opening and fishing it out in all directions. We caught many machaca, mojarra and a few more guapote, although none as large as the one I had hooked and lost. We caught a mudfish as well. It went a whopping 2 ½ inches long. It was amazing. I changed the shrimp pattern and put on a small olive double bead head nymph and found the fish to go crazy for it. The heat of the day had somehow found its way into the canopy of the jungle and put the fish down. They would not take topwater flies now, or even the shrimp flies that we fished just below the surface. These fish now wanted their flies down near the bottom. I gave it to them.

Finally we made our way back out of the darkness of the jungle and into San Juanillo again. We kept going and went around another small passage, though a short one and it opened up into another good waterway down which many boats traversed the land by way of. There in the middle of the water was a large bed of some kind of grass growing. We fished around it. Large mojarra dwelled within it and if you could cast just so and get your fly down far enough, huge guapote would give you a run for your money. We did not land a single guapote from the grass bed. They headed straight for it and got themselves all tangled up in it and there was no way to do anything about it… at least not with a 5 wt.

Jaime picked up his spinning rod and made a few casts at the bank. He picked up several nice guapote with a spinning lure. Two of them went into the well on the boat. He only said one word… dinner. I was not about to lay down the values of catch and release on a person whose traditions and livelihoods depended on NOT releasing the fish. I could not do it. I simply nodded my head in response and continued to fish.

When finally it was time to go, the score was pretty obvious. The guapote had beaten us pretty severely. My flyline was tattered, I had been through several lengths of 30 lb tippet and had broken or lost many flies. I was bitten by bugs from head to toe, sunburned even with the sunscreen and I was tired. I cannot recall ever being so tired in my life, and yet so fully alive, either. It was a strange feeling to experience. We headed back to the Rain Goddess. Peter and Dave were there already waiting upon us. They had done well in San Juanillo, bringing in several good sized guapote early that morning on poppers and 10 wt rods using a straight 8' length of 40 lb test for a leader. One of them had tangled a flyline up in the trolling motor. Then they lost the screw for the motor when they took it off to untangle the flyline. Their adventure had taken them to some place nearby to find a new one at some mid-jungle scrapyard.

I left with Peter and Dave and headed back to the hotel where lunch was waiting for us. We ate a fine lunch, I tried rat for the first time and found it to not be completely unappealing and then we all decided to take a short nap before heading back to Fish Creek for the evening fishing. The night on Fish Creek was like the one before… first on nymphs, then on shrimp, and finally they would take topwater again as dusk began to make its way upon Central America. Mojarra, machaca, guapote, viejito and one snook that decided it wanted Peter's hooked mojarra were caught. The snook got away though, after nearly spooling him.

We returned for a pretty normal dinner and then sat upon the dock and watched the moon rise. It was a full moon for sure and it shone its light down upon us and created many shadows and mysteries while at the same time illuminating many things as well. I was too tired to decipher its messages. I was the first to head to my room. I fell into a deep slumber by 9 pm and somehow managed to sleep until almost 3 the next morning. That is when the dreams returned. I was thankful for the sleep I had gotten though, and instead of cowering in my room, opened the door and walked down to the dock to greet the day, watch the sun rise and try to read the stories that the moon wrote out with its shadows. I was no longer afraid. As the first rays of the sun began to show over the eastern horizon, I was ready for a new day to begin. I wondered what I would see next.

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