Fishing in a Bolivian lake

By Jack Krayenhoff 

In 1973 I took my family to Bolivia: my wife and four children. The reason was that the base of operations, where the pilot of the bush planes, the mechanics, the teachers, the children and everybody else who did not have anything to do with linguistics, lived in an American setting. Their doctor had left and they were desperate for another. Because I had connections with the Instituto Linguistico de Verano, or Summer Institute of Linguistics, I heard of their plight, and decided to help out for a year.

We all worked till 5 o’clock at night, and then had an hour to fish or to swim in the lake. To be a missionary in Bolivia sounds pretty exciting, but this life was not. So besides swimming, I took the canoe out on the lake, and though I am not a fisherman, and cannot tell a salmon from a bass, I took my fishing rod along to add some excitement.

With the rod trailing the lure about 20 feet behind us, we had barely gone a hundred yards when the rod registered action. Sure enough, a fish, and whoops, a big fish! I got hold

of the rod, and began to reel it in. But then there was a big commotion in the water. What was that? The resistance from the fish did not increase, and in fact it looked like smaller fish were creating the turmoil. In about two minutes the episode had ended, and the water was calm again. When I reeled in, there was no resistance from the fish, in fact I wondered if I had lost him. I stood ready with the net, but I had no need of it. When I took the lure into the canoe, it had nothing but a fish head attached to it. Then it dawned on me: I had provided a meal to a bunch of piranhas!

At the end of next day, I went to the dock, and told them my story.

“You swim here so calmly, but do you know there are piranhas in the lake?”

“Sure we know.”

“But if you had seen them yesterday, how they killed and stripped that fish of mine in less than two minutes, you would not be so confident.”
“ But they don’t attack something that isn’t bleeding.”

”You sure?”

“Very sure. Why should we swim here every night?”

They had a point. I got my bathing trunks and got into the water, but with the others in front and off to the side of me, and close to the dock.