Exotica

My first reaction was surprise. “This fish is completely yellow!” Actually, it was probably a golden yellow, but it was light years away from any color you’d expect a gamefish to be.

I was in a river in an indigenous native territory where the Amazon jungle meets the Andes Mountains. I had just beached Chris Lalli’s first golden dorado on a fly. My friend Chris and I had arrived at Tsimane Lodge in Bolivia, unpacked our tackle and walked down to the “home pool” to see whether we could dredge up a dorado on our own before dinner.

We moved downstream just a bit, to a deeper, slower pool that looked as if it might hold some fish. It was deeper than expected, so Chris used an intermediate line, and I dug out a huge black fly with lead eyes. Some debris was along the far bank, but there were no visible signs of life, so we began casting. Cast after cast produced but I figured the practice of throwing oversize flies was good for both of us. Then Chris hooked up to 15 pounds of yellow magic. Awhile later, I caught one, too. We each had one bite out of several hundred casts, but we both landed a dorado in the 15-pound range within the first two hours of our bucketlist trip, so we were pretty stoked with a