Fishing on Lake Gatún in Gamboa

I'm trying to squeeze in All The Adventures in my short time remaining here, and so last Sunday I skipped church (!) to go on a fishing adventure in Lake Gatun.  That's the lake that was formed in the middle of Panama by damming the Gatun River with a big dam called the Gatun Dam.  (Sense a pattern here?)

Damming the river not only kept the erratic rains from creating huge river surges that would have flooded and eroded the canal, it also meant that now the whole middle of the canal is a wide lake where boats can pass one another.  One of my daughters thought the canal would look like a skinny channel all the way across: it doesn't.  It has skinny channels at either end, where the locks are, but in the middle there's a lake surrounded by a beautiful rainforest preserve. That's where we went fishing, and where we got to see MASSIVE container ships passing through.

My boat mates.  They were almost all newbies to fishing,
like me.

I brought my swimsuit, just in case.  But apparently there are crocodiles and caimans in the lake, . . . so none of us went swimming.  Apparently, and oddly, there are also 61 manatees in the lake: they were introduced in an unsuccessful attempt to try to keep the lily pads in check.  I didn't see manatees or lily pads, so this could just be an urban legend.  

We were all given baited fishing rods and lessons on how to use them.
(rods = cañas, bait = carnada).

Being on a lake is lovely, especially when its surrounded by small islands (that used to be hills, before the lake was formed) and distant, preserved rainforest.

My bait dangling from its hook
does not appreciate the view as much as I do.

Did I catch a fish? Yes, I did! It was a slow day on the lake, and among the 15 of us only about four fish were caught, so I feel a little lucky.  

"Mr. Adventure" is pulling the fish out of the net. 

In Spanish: un sargente.  In English: a baby peacock bass. 

I'm acting all proud-like. 
But for some reason I didn't actually touch the fish.

I gave my fish to another passenger who'd caught another bigger one; he took them home to do the messy work followed by the yummy work. 

After the first hour (of four) on the boat, there weren't really many more fish who volunteered to join us inside the boat.  There were a few clever fish outside the boat that ate my bait and left the hook, and there was an aggressive underwater seaweed that snagged my hook and ripped it off the line.  (It was very exciting, because for a while I thought I was wrestling a HUGE fish.  Nopers.)

So, much of our fishing trip was really a "boat tour of the lake" trip, with fishing rods to hold onto and the chance to cast them back and forth.  That was fine by me, too.  

Seeing as we were in a tropical rain forest and seeing as Panama is coming out of its dry season, it makes sense that at some point we saw rain, too. 

Seeing the drops bounce off the water was amazing.
You can't really see the drops falling down, 
but the photograph really captures the resulting splashes bouncing up.

After fishing for four hours, we went out for lunch.  I got to eat a new-to-me fruit, which tastes very much like an apple even though it's clearly not: for example, it has one big round seed almost like an acorn inside.

"Jamaican Apple".
Neither an apple nor (probably) Jamaican.

And that was my fishing adventure, squeezed into my second-to-last weekend here in Panama.