DAY 13. MY NAME IS NOT NOAH

I have slept well for several nights in a row. It is easy to get used to good things. During the night, the boat ran aground. It must have stopped raining upstream. Can we expect sunny days any time now?

I met some fishermen. They told me that some bean-like seeds of a tree would also do as bait, although my experiments with them have not yielded any results so far.

It started to rain again. So, it is time for a clean-up. How nice it is to be able to sit in a dry place during rain and eat my farinha with sugar and bananas. Occasionally a drop or two get blown under my tent by the wind, but that is a small issue that I will fix soon.

All right, I have got a situation at my hands that looks like a film script. There was a film called ‘Life of Pi’, where a boy and a tiger were alone on a boat at sea. I do not have a tiger, of course – a huge spider climbed over to me. It was riding a floating log and moved to my boat at the first opportunity. It looks terrifying.

No sooner had I delivered that spider to the bank than another spider decided to take shelter in my boat. It was sitting on a blue plastic jerry can carried by the muddy stream. No, thank you! One of these passengers per boat is quite enough. My boat is not Noah’s Ark, and I am not Noah to bring two of all living creatures into it.

A headwind rose, and the rain turned into a downpour. The tent was flipping like a sail, so I decided to throw a rope on a big log, but to keep a distance from it so that it would not crush my boat swaying on the waves. Now I am being pulled forward at the speed of 9.1 kilometres per hour. It looks like I am breaking my former record! I believe that my wooden horse would be able to go even faster.

As I was being carried down the river, I replenished my water supply using my emergency blanket to collect it. That gained almost two litres of rainwater, and with this rain it took me less than an hour. This water will be enough for a whole day. Now the rain has stopped, and I am carried out of the mainstream into some quiet backwater. I have to say goodbye to the log that served as my wooden horse to pull the boat forward.

I went ashore to look for the materials to complete the cabin and tried to find two long sticks of some strong but light wood. I could find only one which was good enough. I settled for a lower quality stick as my second beam, but it will have to be replaced sooner or later – it is hollow inside. Despite the jungle around, it is difficult to find a suitable tree – 9 trees out of 10 are used by termites and ants for their colonies.

I returned to the boat and installed the new support beams. Now my tent covers the whole bed. I decided not to connect the beams with a cross beam so that I would not hit my head against it when there is no rain and I do not need to hide under the tent.

It started to pour again, as if the sky decided to test my design right away. The tent structure holds the load. I found myself waiting for dawn. Yeah, and it was still two hours before sunset. The thing is, I have not seen the sun today at all. It has been raining all day. I want to be dry and have dry things. Everything is wet, and my feet are in danger again.

I have been eating farinha so many times in the last few days that I decided to vary my diet and and boil one of the salted fish with some pasta. I still had some food left in my supplies from the hitchhiking days – literally from another life when I had only my rucksack and an endless road ahead of me. Now I have my own vessel! But the sensation is the same.

Murphy’s Law, usually formulated as ‘anything that can go wrong will go wrong’, works without failure. Just when I brought the water to a boiling point on the gas burner, a speedboat passed by. I had to balance on the large waves with a pot of boiling water, trying to avoid a scalding bath.

I saw the sun, right at sunset! I was paddling along the bank looking for a place to set camp for the night when suddenly I came across a bush with black berries, the very kind that Jonas had showed to me as good fishing bait. I got mud all over me, but I managed to pick a few twigs. It looks like my chances of catching a fish have increased by leaps and bounds. I just have to find a place to sleep and clean off all the sand.

I found a quiet nook to park my boat for the night. The sunset is spectacular. I have missed the warmth of the sun so much. A whole day of rain has definitely set a good contrast to the last warm rays. Before going to bed, I decided to try my fisherman’s luck with a berry on the hook. I did not have to wait for a long time and caught a small catfish. I hooked it on the big hook as bait for bigger fish, threw it into the water on the current, and tied a nylon thread to my leg – if some prey takes a bite, I will wake up and hook it.

***

Later, I woke up because something was tugging at my leg. I did not realise what it was straight away. I tried to pull out the predator, which was tempted by my catfish bait, but I had no luck. There was a splash of water – and I did not even have time to take a proper look.

It is about 2 a.m., and I am still trying to catch something. There is hardly any bait left. Well, it will work out next time!

27 April, ~70 (484) km covered.