Steffi the piranha flinger

Based on 24.02, Amazon (Peru).

The scream came first, an extremely happy, high-pitched scream, and then a piranha landed flapping in the bottom of our boat. It had not been reeled in, netted, or hooked. It had been flung there, off the end of a stick, by my wife.

We were three days into the Peruvian Amazon, and our guide Edwin and the boatman had pulled in at a lunch spot on the water. While the two of them got a fire going on the shore and started cooking, we were handed the fishing gear and pointed at the river. Each of us got a stick with a length of string and a hook, and for bait Edwin produced some old roast beef, which we cut up into pieces. Steffi had never been fishing in her life and was quite sure she would not catch anything. So we sat in the boat, dangled our beef in the Amazon, and waited to be wrong.

Steffi could not hook a piranha. She never managed it once all day. What she could do, it turned out, was feel the tug the instant a piranha clamped onto her bait, and yank the stick skyward with so much enthusiasm that the fish came out of the river still attached to the beef. Where it went from there was anyone’s guess. The first one landed in the boat, to that scream. She screamed like that every single time, pure excitement and surprise, because she genuinely did not believe each catch would happen.

Then her range started to improve. The next two piranhas she launched with so much force that they cleared the boat entirely and splashed down on the far side, back into the river and gone. And then she found her target. One piranha, about the size of her palm and flapping so hard it blurred, came off her stick and hit me square in the chest. I said something like “oh god”. It struck my shirt, bounced straight off, and flopped over the side into the water, and once it was clearly out of the boat the two of us laughed until it hurt.

By the time the fire on the shore had done its work, about an hour later, Steffi had four piranhas in the bucket, not counting the ones she had returned to the river by air mail. The boatman was visibly impressed that we had caught so many already. I had caught none. Steffi was extremely proud of herself, and she made sure I knew it: her first time fishing, ever, and four piranhas to my zero, without once using the hook for its intended purpose. I did not have much of a comeback, and honestly I did not need one, because I was mostly just glad we had caught any at all, and seeing real piranhas up close was so cool.

Lunch was simple and good, rice and chicken with tomato, potato and a mandarin, and then we motored off to try two more fishing spots. At the first one I finally got my piranha, cleanly on the hook, the proper way, the first catch anyone had made at that spot. It was quite big for a piranha, big enough that we took a photo of it. At the next spot Edwin pulled in five while Steffi and I caught nothing, and the bucket that rode home with us held six fish in the end: Steffi’s four, my one, and one of the guide’s. The boat ride back was long, past monkeys leaping between trees and macaws brawling upside down in the branches.

That evening the chefs cooked up our catch and served it for dinner, whole fish, crunchy skin and all. There is very little meat on a piranha, they are simply too small, but what there is tastes like a basic white fish, something like sole, and with a squeeze of lime it was genuinely good. The best part was watching Steffi. She does not like fish. Not piranha specifically, fish in general, all of them, always. But these were her fish, caught by her own catapult method, and she wanted to know how they tasted, so she tried a bite. She did not mind it. She did not love it. From the woman who had spent the morning flinging these things at her husband, that was about as close to a rave review as the piranha was ever going to get.