I have now been to Colombia twice, the second time I travelled more extensively. To date, all plans in Colombia have gone exactly on schedule and I have suffered no delays at all. The airports have been a pleasure. Up to date, clean, bright and not crowded. Check-in has been very easy in all cases. All the major hotel brands seem to be there from Four Seasons to Hyatt to Marriott and I have been lucky to go to some really fine restaurants including Ushin, Japanese grill and sushi at the top of the Grand Hyatt, Bogota, Osaka and Andres D.C. which is the most traditional and lively!
As someone said to me, one can get into trouble in any country or city in the world if you go looking for it and that applies to Colombia. However, one cannot help but feel that this is a country where the locals want to put the country on the map, particularly the under-40s. I met some truly talented young people from chefs to biology graduates etc. There seems to be a real determination to see Colombia respected and not known for Pablo Escobar or the FARC. Colombia is also second only to Brazil in species diversity.
I am probably not a guru of payara compared to my Colombian friends like Danny, Felipe, Pablo, Armando and others but when it comes on the UK, on fly, I may be relatively experienced. Suffice to say, just like many of my blogs, what I have to say is based on what I have experienced, and I am determined for that experience to grow. I have now fished for payara twice on the Guaviare in Colombia and once in Brazil at Xingu. Compared to what I have experienced in Colombia, as my Xingu piece describes, I do not rate the Xingu experience at all. We were fishing in very slow and deep water; it was not necessary to make a cast but simply strip line off and let it sink and the payara were not very big when one did hook them. That has not been my experience in Colombia.
It seems that very little is known about the payara. There seem to be a few variants with the one I have encountered likely being Hydrolycus armatus (as opposed to the smaller Hydrolycus scomberoides) or dogtooth characin. People say they migrate, but exactly when and why (to breed or follow baitfish or both) is not really understood it seems. They are mostly known as ‘Vampire’ fish and most commonly caught in the Orinoco basin in Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. On a global scale they probably average 8 to 10lbs but where I have fished for them in Colombia the average is more like 15lbs.
These fish really intrigue me for several reasons. First, they lie in different types of water from slow to very fast, as fast water as an Atlantic salmon would lie in or faster. Just look at where their eyes are, these fish like to attack from underneath, hit their prey hard and then clean up the debris of pieces of fish afterwards which is when one can get in trouble because when a fish attacks and is hooked, others come up looking for the pieces too and sometimes cut the leader.
So, when lying in fast water, they are willing to come up and hit a fly right in the surface and that is the second reason they intrigue me, their willingness to rise and visibly hit a fly in fast water. They do it in medium paced water too. Lastly, you have to work them out, but they show enough (rolling and feeding) that they help you. I guess one further intrigue is they do take extremely hard and pull equally hard and the bigger fish will run (and jump multiple times) and go into the backing.
It is necessary to pull a payara very hard when it takes to stop it wrapping you in drowned trees and other river debris but still the big ones will take you into the backing. If we were playing them like salmon, most would take you into the backing, but we are fishing for them with large hooks which allow us to pull very hard with a 9 or 10#. There are various scenarios where I have caught payara and the more I fish for them, the more comfortable I am that, on many occasions, they lie in ambush in salmon-type water.
My very first experiences of payara were in a canyon of a tributary of the Guaviare. The river begins to speed up through rocks above a waterfall and then comes to a five to fifteen foot waterfall (depending on water height) and the rushing water after the falls. The water then tumbles through the canyon creating all sorts of rushes and fast water lies for the payara. In January of 2020, on our first day in the Colombian jungle we caught fish throughout this sequence of water from above the falls in the white water runs to below the falls and all the fast water lies through the canyon. Due to the speed of water, many of the takes were visible.
Further up the tributary was another waterfall and again we caught payara below them. We also found payara where the main stem of the tributary would deepen and speed up but here the sink-tip lines were important because the payara were less willing to rise all the way.
In the latter part of the week, we found payara where the tributary and main stem met. The tributary was clearer than the main river and payara (and sardinata) would use the dirty water to ambush into the clear. The number of payara we caught here in the mornings and evenings was astonishing and big fish too with two of 25lbs, a 23lbs, 21lbs, 20lbs etc. We well and truly satisfied our desire to catch payara before heading home to learn about this virus which seemed to be spreading from China.
Thanks to that virus it was 2024 before I had the opportunity to return to the same area. We were in a new camp further away from the tributary and the water was lower. I was with a team this time and they were soon catching payara below the falls of the tributary and down through the canyon. My fishing partner and I had to look for new opportunities for payara as we had volunteered to go where they were not a certainty. This worried me but as the week went on, we found more and more opportunities, but it was not as if we got off to a bad start! Jeremy caught his first ever payara right in front of the lodge within about 10 minutes of starting – it was one of the smaller fish we landed at 12lbs. We then went on down river to look for fish where a small creek comes in and if bait fish are dropping into the main river from the creek, the payara can be there in numbers. Again, there was a clear colour difference and we fished around that but it was perhaps too murky, just as we were thinking to look elsewhere we had a take and that lead us to look further down the colour line.
We found fish and suddenly both Jeremy and I had fish on and they were both big. Sadly, his let go quite quickly, but mine turned out to be the biggest I have ever landed at 26lbs and was a really strong fish. Once back at it, Jeremy was into another big fish quickly which was clearly over 20lbs but it let go at the boat. We landed another seven or 8 fish before things went quiet as they do for payara during the hotter hours of the day. This spot was to become the ‘bread-and-butter’ spot for payara for everyone on the trip. We hooked quite a few big fish, but many came off with the next biggest at 22lbs.
As the week evolved, I became intrigued with the water in front of camp. It was like a salmon pool and the payara were lying exactly where I would imagine salmon to lie, below the cut bank in the deeper, faster water. We tried it one evening, drifting and casting into the bank and had many spectacular takes but again losing some big ones. There was no time for the big flies to sink materially despite having sink-tips so many of the takes were visible. The next morning, I was waiting for Jeremy and the guides to come down and thought I would have a try from the bank. I could only fish a spot about seven metres in length because there was a big bush in the way stopping me going further. To my surprise I hooked three payara and they all peeled off line and headed down river with me standing there with no way to follow. Consequently, they all came off! I tried this a couple of times more with the exact same results, fish taking right in front of me off the top and then disappearing down the river. I did land one with the help of a boatman who happened to be there. While with Jeremy and the guide I also hooked a really big fish which ran off down the river about a hundred yards, but they were busy undoing a knot in the rope and did not respond to my cries for help until I was defeated!
On the last day, our ‘bread and butter’ spot was fading due to less water coming out of the little tributary but thankfully we spotted fish on the other side of the main river amongst the dead trees and we enjoyed success. After lunch we tried in front of the lodge but we were intrigued by the beach opposite where there was a break and drop-off and we had seen payara feeding. We went across and found fish there and it was so like salmon fishing. We also saw fish on the other side of the river above us and there was another break and again we found payara swinging the fly out of slow water into the faster stream. For me, the last day was the best day because the fishing just got more and more interesting as we found new spot after new spot.
What are the downsides to fishing for payara? I guess the main one is the size of the flies (often tube flies with large tandem hooks) and the fact it is best to fish with a sink-tip line. We found the best one to be the Rio Leviathan 350 grain. It is hard work but the opportunity or desire to get stuck into a payara does dampen the chore of a big fly and a sink-tip! It is frustrating to lose so many, most as they take but plenty after they are on too. The key, as is the case with dorado, tigerfish and Giant trevally, is really tough strip-striking and yielding no line until you absolutely have to which takes a while with 40lbs test and some knot-able wire! Taping your fingers or wearing good gloves really helps because one is not shy of holding tight to the line which can cause nasty line burns if not protected. Finally, these fish follow bait so, although I have not experienced it, there must be situations where if there are no baitfish, the payara will be hard to find.
As I have made clear, I am intrigued by these fish. I like their willingness to rise, and I feel I am beginning to understand where they lie. Their takes match those of any tiger fish and dorado and for me, they are equally strong. I think they are or should be viewed as a national asset of Colombia because they are undoubtedly worth travelling for. I would however like to see much greater knowledge about the species so that it can be looked after and not over-fished. A Floy tagging programme would be fascinating if locals and other lodges could be encouraged to tag as well or, at the very least, report the capture of tagged fish. Payara remain firmly high in my list!