by Jeremy Wade
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
First Edition: May 2019
Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Da Capo Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934696
ISBN 978-0-306-84531-4 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-306-84530-7 (ebook)
E3-20190404-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
SOURCE
1 Going Under
2 Fishing in Mind
3 Art Meets Science
4 The Importance of Being a Detective
STREAM
5 Think Like a Fish
6 In Search of the Secret Ingredient
7 Less Time Is More
8 Bad Vibrations
LAKE
9 Gear Up
10 Have a Plan
11 Poke the Apple
12 Thou Shalt Knot
RIVER
13 My Life as a Fish
14 More Less Is More
15 When the Right Time Is the Wrong Time
16 Mumbo-Jumbo
DELTA
17 Resist the Flow
18 Be Opportunistic
19 Don’t Think
20 D. E. T. A. I. L. S.
SEA
21 A Sense of Scale
22 (Notes to Self)
23 I’m More Uncompetitive than You
24 Going Under Again
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Afterword
Appendix: Keeping Legal and Good Practice
Glossary
Also by the author
Index
To M, M and C
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There are but
Five notes
And yet their permutations
Are more
Than can ever be heard.
Sun-tzu, The Art of War
‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said the Spider to the Fly.
Mary Howitt, 1828
SOURCE
1
Going Under
There’s something reassuring about low light and weight of water, and this place is one of the safest, deepest holes in the river. Down here, my eyes register the difference between night and day, but not much more. I move by touch, plotting my path on the map of memory. Not just the feel of rocks and sand and mud and weed but also the slip and scrub of the water. Far from being a uniform flow, it moves in different directions and at different speeds. This gives the river a distinct pattern, a grain–complex but logical, invisible but perfectly readable–which subtly encodes the position of the obstacles that shape it. This is why, even when I’m not touching anything solid, I always know where I am.
I nose into the place I was looking for. Close to my left side is a vertical rock wall, rising almost to the surface. If I were to reach out sideways with the tentacle on my upper jaw, I could touch it. Ahead of me is more rock, rising in steep steps, down which the water tumbles. I’m in the angle formed by these two rocks, my belly lightly bumping on the riverbed. Behind me the water shallows somewhat and spreads out into a pool, before funneling into a rock-strewn run. Back there, marking time in the friction-slowed water near the riverbed, and lurking on the edges of the flow, are other hungry fish, which would rather be in the place where I am now, if it were not already occupied.
What’s special about this spot is that anything carried by the current will settle directly in front of me, in the deep residual turbulence of the waterfall, where I can investigate it with minimal effort. And it appears that something is already here. The familiar smellscape is colored by tendrils of something else. I edge to my right and the scent gets stronger. My tentacle finds its source, and easing closer I confirm that it’s a dead fish, its scales reflecting the almost non-existent light. It’s fresh and succulent, but something about it troubles me.
Earlier today I saw one of the large shapes slide across the surface. I heard its high-pitched whine before I saw the silhouette. I’ve seen these before and I know they are dangerous. A couple of times, shortly after one passed, I’ve seen a red-tail fish twisting unnaturally and rising in the water, sending out its chemical alarm. So I back away and leave this meal, which looks too much like a gift. But I stay close enough to deter any competitor from darting in.
When I check on it later, the dead fish is still there. This is reassuring. I move up close and open my mouth, creating just enough suction to lightly pick it up. It moves freely, not appearing to be tethered. I back off a short distance and then drop it, and as I do so it appears to get caught in a tongue of current, fluttering up then obliquely down, before sliding to a rest right at the base of the rock face.
It doesn’t move anymore, and I have the taste of it now, urging me to throw off any remaining caution. I wait and watch, inching closer, then open my mouth fully to suck it right in. As I do so, I double my body to the right, to turn my head downstream.
Sixty feet above, on a slanting rock beside the river, an electronic buzzer sounds and a dim green light shows thick nylon line rolling off an improbably large reel. Hands reach down and pick up the rod, then push the drag lever forward. With the spool now locked, the growing tension in the line starts to transmit in both directions. What happens now could determine how this ends. Not enough of a pause and the strike may not set the hook; too much and the bait may be ejected. So there’s an instant of intense weighing and calculation, before the rod pulls up and back–and is wrenched down in response.
It’s the moment this creature, which until then had existed only in my imagination, becomes real…
2
Fishing in Mind
One day in 1999 a man pulled a gun on me in Brazil, but the only time I’ve been shot was in England. I was sitting on the ground at the edge of a small pond, legs pulled up in front of me, with my arms wrapped around my knees, when something ripped through the foliage some yards to my right. It took a few moments to work out what it was. The f
armer was on the far bank, and he’d taken a shot at a coot in front of me. He couldn’t see me because I was underneath a willow tree, obscured by its trailing branches.
All this had barely registered when a second shot ricocheted off the water, this time just a couple of feet away, having narrowly missed the bird, which was now squawking in alarm. The next shot hit me in the right armpit.
Recalling this now I have trouble believing the reaction of my much younger self. As a teenager I was pretty useless in a number of respects, but there was nothing wrong with my reflexes and I had a well-developed sense of moral outrage. But I just continued to sit there. Having verified that there was no broken skin under my thick camo jacket, I concluded that it was probably just an air rifle–which he didn’t fire again.
At this point everyone who has heard this story assumes I must have been ‘guesting,’ as the quaint euphemism goes. But no–I was there legally, as a paid-up club member. So what was it? Why didn’t I dive for cover and/or start yelling at the farmer?
What I have to remember is how seriously I took my carp fishing. I was in stealth mode, fishing close in, and I didn’t want to add to the disturbance. But, more importantly, I had recently invented ‘twig-hung crust.’ And although it was possible–as happened with the jet engine and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy–that somebody, somewhere else had come up with the same idea, I didn’t want to draw attention to my field tests.
The challenge with the carp in this pond, which sits on the edge of a Suffolk village, was that they were very wary of floating breadcrust, which back then was everybody’s go-to surface bait. Normally the carp here would ignore it completely, but where the willow branches trailed in the water they would sometimes seem curious. The trouble with a freelined crust, though–a hook on the end of the line with no float, weights or anything else–was that it would always drift out of this zone, whereupon it would receive no more attention. Trying the obvious alternative, a crust anchored in position by a running lead on the bottom, would spook the carp when they bumped into the line.
My wheeze was to position myself to the side of the willow’s trunk and swing an underhand cast straight out, towards a partial gap in the semicircular curtain of branches. In the middle of this gap was a single dangling branch that stopped two feet short of the water, with a horizontal twig projecting. My aim was to cast the bait over this twig, then tease it back into a position where there was no line on the surface to alarm the fish. A belly of slack line between rod tip and twig would allow the bait to move freely if taken.
Now the bait stayed in the zone long enough for any patrolling carp to investigate. My position under the tree also meant less chance of attracting the ducks, which were used to being fed by people and could read any human actions that were bread related. What I hadn’t reckoned with was that some of them could also read the minds of fish. On two occasions a duck spotted my bait at the precise moment when a dark shape was tilting up towards it. After pausing for a couple of heart-pounding seconds, I had to lift the bait then flick it clear of a lunging beak.
But even when there was no competition from these feathered pests, the carp were super cautious. They would leave baits alone for a long time–over two hours sometimes without touching it, just looking occasionally–long enough for a normal crust to become semi-liquid and fall off the hook. Only a tough piece from the base of a carefully chosen loaf, cut not torn to shape, so as not to fissure the leathery skin, was going to stand a chance. Then, when a carp finally did take the bait… it didn’t really take it. It would hold it gently in the extremity of its mouth and start to move off–and then let go. Striking before it let go, I discovered, connected with nothing. Far from bringing quick results, my new technique simply confirmed what everyone said and believed back then: that carp were supernaturally intelligent and mostly uncatchable.
Then one day, a quarter-hour after casting, a carp passed then circled back. In the next five minutes it gently mouthed the bait three times, each time moving it about eighteen inches before letting go. Then, finally, it didn’t let go. I tightened up and was answered by a powerful plunge. After playing it first in the open water beyond the branches, then at close quarters under the umbrella of foliage in front of me, I slipped the net under a twelve-pound mirror carp.
A few days later I got one more, 13lb 10oz, and that was my lot for that water that summer. But back then in the early 1970s, double-figure carp were a big deal, and these fish helped to confirm my transition from carp angler to carp catcher.
Looking back now, I am struck by two things: how much my fishing has changed since then–and how much it is the same. Not the same in the way of the gear I use, or the fish I go after, or the waters I fish–these things could hardly be more different–but the same general approach at the heart of it all. In this story from the dusty recesses of memory, I see a way of fishing that is recognizably a precursor of the way I fish today.
The only thing that’s fundamentally different–something my younger self never expected or dreamed of–is that when I go fishing now, I have an audience. Or, rather, I have two audiences.
One audience is the small group of people on the bank behind me, who will tell you, if you ask them, that fishing is absolutely the dullest spectator sport on the planet, if you have to watch it in unedited real time. They are there because it’s their job. Somehow they’ve got to turn an activity that mostly happens inside the protagonist’s head into compelling visual entertainment. So while I am in a timeless zone of cosmic oneness with nature, which looks identical to being half asleep, they are watching the seconds drag by.
Sometimes, to help pass the time, they engage in hushed conversation. Once, while watching the sun sink below the far bank of the Zambezi, in Mozambique, they spent an hour discussing the relative merits of different condiments in sandwiches. At other times, they ask me questions.
‘Why do you always fish with your finger on the line?’
‘What made you pick this spot?’
‘Why don’t you do what the local fisherman said, and put more baits out?’
‘Are you really serious when you say we should pack everything up, and come back later?’
Sometimes they ask because I appear to be doing something illogical, or because it looks like I’m wasting time. Or it’s just simple curiosity, a desire to understand the arcane process of trying to summon a fish. Once in a while there’s even a question that I should have asked myself, but didn’t. Whatever prompts them, these questions are always challenging. Usually I can give some kind of answer, but sometimes I can’t. Or I start to answer, but the mental trail, after a few promising turns, enters the non-verbal right side of my brain, a place as mysterious as the water in front of me. And I find myself doing a different kind of fishing. I know there’s something there–I can glimpse it–but I can’t grasp it.
The other audience is with me in a strange, disembodied, but equally real way. These are the people who see me on a screen, catching a variety of rare, large, and sometimes very difficult fish, from all manner of ponds, creeks, lakes, rivers, estuaries and sometimes oceans around the world. Many of these people also have questions, but of a different type. They are asking for advice. Often the questions are quite detailed–this species, that location–but they boil down to the same thing:
‘Why do I just get small fish all the time? How do I catch the big ones?’
‘What’s your secret?’
The questions used to arrive by email, and in the early days, before the sheer quantity of messages, of all kinds, forced me to go electronically ex-directory, I would reply to everyone who contacted me. But again I struggled to know what to say, only this time it wasn’t because of the inherent non-verbal nature of what goes on in an angler’s head. The questions made me feel fraudulent.
The truth is, the kind of angling I do is very far from typical. And my knowledge, and practice, of the types of angling that most people do, these days, is pretty sketchy. The last time I did any
amount of general coarse angling was in my teens, nearly fifty years ago. I last fished regularly for carp (and English wels catfish) in my twenties. I find this hard to believe myself, but the fork in the road that I took, in March 1982, to travel to far-flung waters after more exotic fish, was an all-or-nothing step. It didn’t leave any surplus time or resources for anything else. So for most kinds of fishing that you care to mention, there are many people out there who would leave me standing. I’m very far from being an all-around expert, and I’m most definitely not a walking encyclopedia. What I do is very niche.
Specifically, until the last decade or so, my thing was making long expeditions, on the cheap and mostly solo, to places where other anglers didn’t go–to catch fish that most people, back then, had never heard of: mahseer in India, goliath tigerfish in the Congo, arapaima in the Amazon. For this kind of fishing, the main achievement was getting back in one piece. Catching fish was a bonus–dependent on avoiding injury, illness and arrest, then having some last dregs of energy left to get a line in the water. Traveling could be painfully slow–sometimes two or three weeks just to get to the water, and the same to get out–and my gear was limited to what I could carry onto a crowded bus, truck or passenger boat. It couldn’t have been further from the roach, chub and pike that started me on this journey.
Then came my pact with the machine that now follows me around, transforming a weightless part of me into a homunculus of dancing pixels. Although my more recent travels are (mostly) less seat-of-the-pants, and shorter in duration–three weeks normally, instead of two to five months–they have continued in a similar vein, having little or no overlap with most people’s experience. And what this seemed to underline, when I started to think about it, was that I was uniquely unqualified to give any kind of fishing advice to anyone.