> ABOUT LAKE MERIN OUTFITTERS

Twenty five years ago, Alvaro Barcellos Souza Mouawad, hunter and fisherman since a boy and owner/partner of Lake Merin Outfitters, became involved in the organization of hunting & fishing operations in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. In the early years, Alvaro’s experience was primarily with big game hunts around the Argentina pampas, fly fishing for trout in the foothills of the Patagonian Andes, and Peacock Bass fishing in Brazil’s many rivers and lakes.

But Alvaro’s big dream was always to build a place for waterfowlers, and in 2004, he and his friend Fernando Hubner Rosales, also owner/partner of Lake Merin Outfitters started the company, and built the Laguna Lodge, a lodge built especially for duck hunters on the edge of the Laguna Merin.  The idea was to offer quality duck hunting, at an affordable price—and that is exactly what they have done with Lake Merin Outfitters.  

Every single waterfowl environment has its own features, whether it is duck behavior, flight patterns, migration habits, feeding characteristics, or whether ducks are more or less sensitive to certain type of blinds or camouflage patterns or even decoy types, or if they are more or less likely to change unexpectedly. If we had to sum it up in a few words we would call it: “the search for consistency”. For a duck hunting outfitter, consistency (or the fear for the lack of it) is what probably best describes the main reason for most of his worries: how to keep ourselves from being “deceived by the ducks” -to put it in a gentle manner. 

From Alvaro’s first visit to Mississippi Delta marshlands, Iowa cornfields and Missouri lakes and over the years he have had the chance to go on numerous hunting trips to different places in the US and to visit various waterfowling camps as well as duck clubs. These trips were eye openers for him in the sense that he was able to understand valuable factors in the American waterfowling tradition: the meaning of the night before the hunt, the aesthetics involved in the hunting methods, the importance of being able to make the ducks come to your shooting place or blind and to have them decoy properly, the beauty of the dog work, the importance of good decoy spreads and duck calls, as well as the appreciation for certain perceptions that are invaluable to most waterfowl hunters such as the sounds of the marsh and the long silences.

Through all these years the challenge has been to recreate many of these concepts within a totally different reality, that is the wild environment that surrounds the marshes and potholes of Uruguay. Of all the different areas he experienced hunting through the years it was the huge rice fields and marshes of the Laguna Merin area that enabled him to approach consistency and predictability in a higher degree. This is pothole country which may very well remind North America marshes, but where winters can be not so cold and landscape may be more familiar to what duck hunting areas are supposed to look like. The Laguna Lodge is located in the border of the Laguna Merin, a huge lagoon circled by marshlands, rice fields and hundreds of small rivers and bays, in the in the most productive region of the country for duck hunting. This is a place for ducks…and duck hunters.