I Lost My Vision Fly Fishing on a Jungle River. Here’s What It Was Like.

I first heard about Jim Klug’s accident in the Bolivian jungle while I was working in a fly shop and outfitter service in Colorado. When it comes to fly fishing in remote places, there aren’t many people with a deeper resume or more passport stamps than Jim. As the owner of Yellow Dog Fly Fishing, visiting off-the-grid places is a major part of Jim’s job.

I’d met Jim before, and the details of the incident that reached me were vague.  Apparently, he’d been blinded somewhere in the jungle and needed an emergency air evacuation—out of Bolivia.

None of it quite made sense. He had traveled internationally to fly-fishing destinations for more than 25 years without any type of serious mishap. Knowing Jim and what he does professionally, it sounded like fly fishing folklore.

But recently, I had the chance to sit down with Jim and hear the full story directly.

I’d always believed that accidents happen to other people. As long as I paid attention and stayed situationally aware, I figured I could avoid any real trouble. That mindset stuck with me right up until my trip deep into the Sécure River, a remote jungle river in Bolivia, to photograph and fish for golden dorado in October 2012.

On the third day of the trip, while heading back to the lodge after camping 20 miles upstream, everything went sideways. As tends to happen when a normal day suddenly becomes a catastrophe, it all unfolded fast.

We were moving downstream in big 28-foot dugout canoes with a guide, two anglers, and two local boatmen poling us along with long wooden poles. As we entered a fast section of water, the front boatman tried to push us off a rock outcropping. His pole jammed between the rocks, but instead of letting it go, he held on and tried to muscle it free. As the boat drifted, the pole bent back like a drawn bow until he couldn’t hold it anymore. When it slipped from his hands, it snapped back and hit me square in the face.

I never even saw it coming.

The pole hit my right eye with the force of a heavy wooden baseball bat. The impact knocked me out instantly. When I was pulled from the water, I had no vision in either eye. My right eye had more damage, but initially, I couldn’t see out of either one.

When I finally regained consciousness after getting pulled out of the river, lying there on the riverbank, I thought, You have to be kidding me. This cannot happen to me. This is what I hear about happening to someone else, not me.

But yet, there I was, on the riverbank, and I could no longer see. I was later told this was due to the head trauma and the fact that I had been hit directly across both eyes.

I remember a lot of pain. It felt as if there were a knife jammed into my right eye. And I felt a lot of nausea and sickness from the blow to the head and face.

From where the accident happened, it took us hours just to get back to the lodge because we were so far upriver. We were about as far off the grid as you could be. Both of my eyes had been wrapped to stabilize things, so I was literally in the dark. I remember the trip back to the lodge seemed to take forever, and then, once we arrived, I had to basically be carried up a lot of steps from the river.

I think I was in and out of consciousness and clarity during the journey back. But one thing I remember very clearly was thinking about what it would be like to be a father without being able to see. At the time, I had really young kids—a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and my youngest, who had not yet turned one. I was thinking a lot about what it would be like to raise the kids with no vision or limited vision. How would I play ball, or teach them to fish, or watch them at their graduation ceremonies or weddings? I don’t ever remember being mad. I was more bewildered that something so random would actually happen. I was definitely scared, though. Especially in the hours following the accident.

In the midst of it all, what kept me going was that I knew that we would have a solid exit plan. It was a freak accident, completely random, brutally fast.

Thankfully, I had a satellite phone.

One moment I was floating back to the lodge after a good day, and the next I was dealing with a serious medical emergency in one of the most remote places imaginable. My fishing partner grabbed the satellite phone and started working on the evacuation plan.

What followed was a blur of calls, medical advice relayed from thousands of miles away, and doing whatever we could with what we had. We made arrangements for an early-morning air evacuation. When I left, both my eyes were bandaged. I later learned that it was standard procedure to prevent any sympathetic movement between them.

From there, I was flown to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and admitted to the hospital, then sent on to Miami, Florida, the next day to meet with doctors and eye specialists. Once I made it back to Miami, I was taken straight to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.

Today, my vision is fine.  No headaches, no residual or negative effects from the accident.  I feel extremely lucky. My left eye had fully restored vision within a week or two. My right eye was a much slower healing process, but within a couple of months, it had mostly recovered.

Accidents happen, and mine was a bad one. But as I think about it now, I would say that we don’t expect anything to go wrong; we’re fishing, right? We all want to look for adventure, and that’s the great thing about traveling and fishing in these far-off places. We’re going out to have fun.

That’s always a good attitude to have right up to the moment there is a problem. Then you have to ask and answer the question: Now what? I always make sure I have the answer to that question.

This story has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.