Jaguar Detectives

Category: Jaguar Corridor Expedition | Date: Nov 21 2008 | By: jaguardetectives

The day was still struggling to show its first signs and we were already preparing for breakfast, when two people, almost unnoticeably, climbed down the banks toward the river margin: Carlos Plateiro and one of the assistants who work on the farm he owns in Anaurilândia. Breakfast postponed, we disembarked to talk with our friend.

The day was still struggling to show its first signs…

…we disembarked to talk with our friend.

It is worth making a parenthesis here to tell a short personal story:
I read about Carlos when I still was in high school, and the story of that hunter who came to help researchers to catch jaguars thrilled me. Many years after the boring daily classes at that high school in Minas Gerais, in July 2004, I found myself running beside him and his dogs to capture a female jaguar and change its radio collar. Carlos’ skills to follow tracks and his knowledge of these felines are matchless.

Carlos’ skills to follow tracks are matchless.

Many people think it is incongruent to have so much admiration for old hunters such as Carlos and Sasha Siemel (a Ukrainian who became well-known for killing jaguars in Pantanal with a kind of spear called zagaia). However, these men come from a different historical moment, far different from modern safaris.

Tigrero! Sasha Siemel’s 1953 book.

Carlos did not stay long, and we soon set off. The morning was stressful. We had to cross a true minefield in the paliteiros.

… a true minefield in the paliteiros.

It can sound repetitive, but it is extremely difficult to understand why those trees were left untouched when the water level was raised. There must be a good reason! The excess of organic remains available in the environment favors the proliferation of bacteria that use up water oxygen, leaving no oxygen for the rest of the system, in a phenomenon known as eutrophication. Although it was not observed in this lake, there is still a question about the advantages of leaving all those trees to die without using their wood, impairing navigation, and also running the risk of decreasing the number of fish due to lack of oxygen in the environment… There must be a reason.
After crossing the paliteiro, we reached the river channel and carried on. We picked up good speed with a tailwind (that coming from directly behind the boat). As we approached the dam, the wind was stronger and the waves higher and higher. We started to radio for guidelines to proceed for the locking operation. In a nutshell, a lock is a system of gates for connecting bodies of water at different water levels; most of us are more or less aware of this process: it is the same used in the Panama Canal, since the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are not at the same level, which makes this system necessary for vessels to cross from one side to the other. In our case, we were preparing to go from the highest level (dam) to the original riverbed, 20 meters lower.

The lock

After several attempts, we established a radio connection and were given instructions to tie the boat to one of the six dolphins (a dolphin is a concrete pile to which vessels may be moored) that were near the entrance to the lock.

The dolphins

Our contact was calmly checking if it would be possible to authorize us to pass, despite the fact that we had already been authorized one month before. At that moment, we were informed that the maximum height that lock can accommodate is 10 meters, which left us in a far from happy situation with our 11.25 meters (9.75 of mast and 1.50 of draft). With waves almost 3 meters high moving our boat up and down with a force of some few, but not friendly, tons, we were trying – at the same time – to tie the boat, to speak on the radio, and to steer the helm, while the already introduced waves were happily pushing us toward the concrete wall. We could not tie the boat to the dolphin we thought was safer, and the boat came to bump into the wall, while we were desperately trying to get it out of there. While we waited for instructions from our calm friend, we tried hard to avoid the waves and their not insignificant tons of pressure making our sailboat and ourselves into small floating pieces that, these indeed, would serenely go down the river. We succeeded – if we can say that – in our efforts to tie the boat to another dolphin ahead, one that was not so close to that almost magnetic concrete wall.

The killer one.

Higher and higher waves were moving the boat up and down when one of them hit us right on the side and broke the two ropes we had tied as if they were threads. Our reflexes sharpened by the not-at-all-funny risk of losing the boat and our lives, we sailed through the waves looking for a safe place to go over the best way to deal with the situation. In our maps, we found an inlet and we headed there helped by GPS, while everything was shaking and threatening to go out of place, due to the force of the wind and the up-and-down waves.
The authorization for the locking operation was denied owing to our boat height. What should we do? Give up? Only if the boat sinks! Although the manual of the O’day 23 (the model of our sailboat) tells that at least three people are needed to disassemble and assemble the mast, we could lower it and tie it in one hour, and at 5 PM we got the authorization for the locking operation.

Give up?

The operators were having problems to open the gate. So, already bitten by the experience with the dolphins, even with lower waves, we decided to sail back slowly to the inlet that had sheltered us before, in case they could not open the gate before nightfall.

Fortunately, everything came out well, and we finally entered the canal for the locking operation.

Everything was fine. We reached the original bed of the Paraná River and – yes – the Jaguar Corridor! We moored about 2 km downstream from the lock, in Porto Primavera.