| Black Water, White Sand and Green Jungle
After a flight of about 30 minutes, we came into sight of two miniature appearing boats, each parked and spaced along the edge of a wide sandbar in the middle of the river. One was the Amazon Queen and the other one turned out to be the boat of, what Phil called a “Johnny come lately” competitor. Phil explained that it was an unusually dry year, that the river was still receding, and that it would continue receding for several more weeks. If he didn’t get the Queen upriver right away, past this low spot in the river, it would be too late and the Queen would miss a whole season of fishing. The good news was that, even while we were flying to meet her, the crew of the Queen had freed her from the submerged bar she had been trapped on and she was now floating free, moored to the side of this larger, exposed, mid-channel sand bar.
We landed and grounded the plane on the sand bank in back of the Queen and proceeded to walk along the sandbar to her. The captain met us halfway and informed us that directly ahead of us, upriver, there was a maze of submerged sandbars that were too high for the minimum draft of the Queen. He had gotten the boat hung up on one before, eventually, freeing it. He and Phil quickly got into a confab about strategies of what to do. They decided that it was in order to take a flyover of the area to see if they could determine the best directions for a channel through the maze. In the meantime the Captain had radioed in one of the Nitro’s that had been out fishing to come in and help with the piloting.
 Amazon Queen – At the Sand Bar
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