How to Think Like a Fish

by Jeremy Wade

  So if I were a fish, big enough to have my pick of all the places in that pool, where would I be? It seemed pretty clear cut: where the water tumbled into the deep hole. My place was sorted. As for bait, this would be the most succulent dead fish we could get hold of, ideally about two pounds in weight, with cuts to let the scent slowly dissipate. Time was the thing we had little choice over. It had almost run out. But I didn’t want to fish the remaining 24 hours around the clock: I wanted to fish with full focus and alertness. I decided on night-time because if I were a fish, that’s when I would feel safer.

  Late next afternoon we were back. The rocks in the river, I noticed, now showed a distinct high-water mark well above the surface. The water was falling, which I took as a good sign. Any fish that might have moved upstream might have dropped back. Moving slowly and quietly, the crew disembarked onto a sloping slab of rock and took all their kit well back from the water. They’d heard it all before, but I made a special point of emphasizing stealth. I’d be fishing close in, and despite the noise of water pouring into the pool, even a single careless thud could transmit to a fish and ruin our chances.

  Because of all the rocks in the water, I had geared up with 100lb monofilament line right through, with a short leader of 300lb braided Kevlar for the necessary combination of strength and suppleness at the business end. To hold enough line to cope with a big fish charging down the pool, I was using a massive saltwater multiplier (50lb-class, wide spool, long range), and to match this I was using a super-stout 6ft rod that a gentleman from Long Island, New York, had built for me for shore-based shark fishing.

  By any normal freshwater standards (and most saltwater standards, for that matter) such gear is complete overkill. But I wasn’t after a normal-sized fish, and this wasn’t a normal fishing situation. The main thing here, because of the sharp rocks close in, was that nice, user-friendly braided line would have been nonsensical. Everything else followed on from that.

  I ensured accurate bait placement by doing this from the boat–quite apart from the fact that casting with this gear would have been impossible. The bait was held in place by a 7oz weight attached to a sliding swivel by a short length of 18lb line tied with bad knots–so if the weight became snagged it would easily break free. Then I put out a second line, heavy braid this time, way down to the middle of the pool, 150 yards away. This was an insurance policy, or a gamble, depending on your point of view. I’m not normally a fan of extra lines, but in this case I reckoned that the pros of this outweighed the cons. With the baits out, we then moored the boat in position for an emergency boarding if necessary. If a fish didn’t look like stopping, or became snagged, my boatman Neville would take me onto the water. Finally I set and tested my bite alarms, which transmitted to a receiver next to my ear. I told the crew to get some rest. They’d know soon enough if anything happened.

  Night fell and the world quietened. I had a good feeling: not the certainty that I would catch a fish (which some anglers have a habit of remembering after the event) but certainty that I was doing everything right, or as right as I possibly could. I’d been through the mental drill, with each rod, of working out which hand would go where and in what order, should I need to pick it up and strike, and I’d repeated this in my head so I wouldn’t have to think about it at the time. Imperceptibly I entered that special zone. I was simultaneously relaxed, wakeful and alert–a state of mind that is a tonic in itself, which we would all do well to enter more in everyday life, but which we rarely achieve. It’s a variant of what’s known in some martial arts as zanshin, a state of awareness and readiness, which isn’t a normal default but something that needs to be cultivated. I knew that something could happen at any moment, which might be ten hours away or one breath away. But whenever it happened, it would almost certainly be my only opportunity.

  At an unknown hour the buzzer stuttered into life and I was on my feet. It was the other rod going, the right-hand rod. Something had taken the bait in the middle of the pool. I picked up, engaged the drag to its pre-set strike setting, let the line tighten, pulled back–and felt the weight of a fish. But I could tell straight away it wasn’t a big one. On the heavy gear I brought it in quickly and swung it ashore. It was a dark-colored catfish just a few pounds in weight, with its eyes near the angle of a deep-cleft mouth and a pair of half-inch tentacles recessed into the upper jaw. The disturbance caused by catching such a small fish was unwelcome, but with our low fish count to date it was worth getting a few quick shots before it went back.

  It was while I was showing this fish to the camera that the other alarm sounded. I dropped the small catfish in the water and went to the big rod, but the run had stopped. Maybe it had spooked because of the movement on the bank. After a little while I pulled the line gently to see if I could feel the bait, and there it was. Or was it? I pulled some more and thought I could feel the weight moving, bumping along rock. I considered pulling the bait out to check it but decided to leave it, in a position that was now very close to the base of the drop-off.

  Scarcely had I done this when the line started moving out again. This time it kept going, so I engaged the reel… then struck. The answering pull had me yelling for the harness and for getting the camera light out of my face–and on the verge of jumping in the boat. But the heavy gear did its job and stopped the fish building up momentum, and brought it, eventually, to a sulking halt. Then suddenly something wasn’t right. It felt as if the line was grating on something, and the contact was no longer direct. But at least I could still feel, just, a force that was alive. I tried to process this information–line trapped in a cleft in a rock?–and think what to do. But then everything was viscerally direct once more, my body doubling in response to the lunges on the line. The pressure, however, was having its effect: the fish was grudgingly coming closer, and up through the water column. Then–maybe it touched the sunken lip of our ledge or it was the sight of our lights–there was a huge explosion on the surface that showered us all with water. My uncertainty now focused on the hook hold; almost everything depended on that. A couple more huge swirls had us straining to see it, while Neville stood ready with a rope to put around its tail, because our sloping platform would not be a secure place to hold a big fish.

  When the moment came, Neville made no mistake. Immediately I put the rod down and grabbed the lower jaw. As the dark-grey body emerged from the water, a hushed voice from behind was heard to say, ‘Oh… my… God!’ A minute later we hoisted it in a heavy-duty sling and for the few seconds that it was clear of the ground a set of industrial scales recorded a weight, minus the sling, of 251 pounds.

  Only after the fish was back in the water did we notice the blood. While holding up an LED light-panel to illuminate the action, our assistant producer had been attacked by night-flying wasps. The noises she’d been making while the rest of us had been impatiently shushing her had been her one-handed attempts to fend them off, and the sounds of suppressed screams as they stung her. The bleeding nose was from a self-inflicted punch, while the light continued to shine steadily on the other battle until its end.

  It’s a footnote that says something about dedication, the strong desire for a successful result, which is part of most fishing stories and part of what makes us fully human. But the defining part of this story, I think–the part that made the real difference–is the time I spent looking into the water, letting my mind drift, as I tried to think like a fish.

  6

  In Search of the Secret Ingredient

  In the dry season the Luangwa River shrinks to a narrow ribbon in the middle of a wide, flat, sandy floodplain. Where the water deepens into pools, there are dense grey-and-pink archipelagos of sunburnt hippopotamuses, flicking their ears and laughing menacingly if you start to come too close. But this morning things are different. It rained during the night, and the river now has branches: small streams just a few feet wide, reaching through the gaps in the edge of the plain into the beds of ghost side-rivers.

  I am walking along
the sand when I see movement up ahead. Where one of these new streams bends and widens there is a ripple, which becomes a hump of water pushing upstream. It is a sizeable fish, long and sinuous, which barely has enough depth to swim. With stealth unnecessary, I run up to it, and see that it is some kind of catfish. As it continues to wriggle against the flow, I sweep a hand underneath its middle (being careful to avoid its pectoral fins, in case it has sharp spines) and flick it onto the sand. It’s the size of my forearm, maybe four pounds, and in the next half-hour I get two more.

  As my head buzzes under the equatorial sun, I have a sudden realization. This is almost certainly how fishing started. Not only that, it’s also where it started. I’m in eastern Zambia, in Africa, the continent where our two-legged ancestors split off from the four-legged great apes around six million years ago, and where modern Homo sapiens first arose, around 200,000 years ago, with their large brains and clever hands, before they spread around the rest of the world. The knowledge makes this catch momentous. And it makes me wonder. Was my predatory reaction to the sight of those fish because I am an angler, or because I am human? What’s certain is that my African ancestor would not have put those fish back in the water, as I did. For somebody living hand to mouth, a fish in the hand, after weeks of drought, might be a lifesaver.

  But the chance grabbing of a stranded fish, on its hopeful way to its once-a-year spawning, isn’t going to come along very often. Early humans would have known that there were plenty of other fish in the water, but how to get them? This wouldn’t have been just a matter of idle curiosity: there was a powerful incentive to be inventive, and to use their inventions effectively. And the measure of success was brutal. If the energy value of what they extracted from the environment was less than the energy expended in the process of extracting it, they would waste away and die. It’s the same principle that Mr. Micawber famously summarizes in David Copperfield: if income exceeds expenditure the result is happiness, but if expenditure exceeds income, even by the tiniest amount, the result is misery. In the case of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, however, it was more than happiness versus misery: it was survival or starvation, literally life or death.

  So necessity drove invention. It’s easy to imagine how, at first, fishermen started using clubs and spears for fish that couldn’t simply be grabbed. Then came harpoons for bigger fish, where a harpoon head made from bone or horn, complete with barbs and attached to a length of cord made from twisted vegetable fibers, broke away from the wooden shaft after impaling. The earliest known harpoon heads, carved from bone and most probably used for catfish, date from about 90,000 years ago, and were found in the southern Congo basin.

  Then came an invention to target fish with better accuracy. Some years after my visit to the Luangwa River I was in the Solomon Islands, in the South Pacific. One of my tasks here was to shoot a mullet with a bow and arrow, up one of the mangrove-fringed creeks. I already had some experience with a bow, having shot a couple of peacock bass in the Amazon. The technique for this was to paddle a canoe through flooded undergrowth at first light and find the fish resting motionless at the surface. For somebody who can shoot accurately and get through the tangles quietly, they can be sitting ducks. The mullet were a different proposition entirely. This was because we hardly saw any. Standing in the bow of the wobbly canoe I let fly a few arrows at distant shadows but it looked like I was going to finish up empty-handed. Then I saw three fish arrowing out of the mangroves–four feet down, one behind another, blurring towards me diagonally right to left. I tracked ahead of the middle one, then slightly down to correct for refraction, and released. From the behavior of the buoyant arrow-shaft I instantly knew that I’d scored a hit. I could hardly believe it: one of my flukiest catches ever. And it brought a strange mixture of emotions: a dying fish in my hands but a feeling of accomplishment, and another frisson of connection across the millennia.

  As fish-hunting inventions go, a sharp projectile fired with force has a certain predictability about it. But some techniques used by the islanders take some believing. Consider the kuarao. One morning I joined the men as they set off into a patch of forest, armed with machetes. For two hours they hunted and cut lengths of vine–a thumb-wide stem with long, narrow leaves every few inches–and joined them into a single super-vine a few hundred feet long. They then took one end and walked it into the waist-deep water of the reef, where it formed a green line on the surface, which extended and curved and eventually formed a circle more than a hundred yards across. At this point the women and children joined in, spacing themselves around the perimeter, as the two ends started to overlap, closing the circle down. As the process continued, the circle became smaller still, as the curtain of leaves became more and more dense and the people shuffled closer together. Then we could see them: a shoal of panicked fish, darting here and there around a small circular enclosure made from lumps of dead coral, with one gap in its wall.

  The endgame was the final drawing-tight. Instead of swimming between the feet of the laughing, curly-haired children, the fish chose the perceived safety of the corral, whose door closed behind them. Then the spears rained down, and a canoe started to fill with the exotic colors of dead and still-flapping aquarium fish. When there were enough for the planned village feast, the rest of the fish were released.

  The method works thanks to a profound insight into fish psychology. If the vine were a net, it would immediately make sense, but there is no physical barrier to stop the fish getting out. Maybe the vine’s shadow makes it seem more substantial than it is. Another theory is that the thin, flexible leaves make a rattling sound in the water as they move. Whatever the explanation, the other big question is: how did the islanders invent it? The answer must lie in the nature of the Solomon Islands. They are tiny scraps of unproductive land, which would have forced the inhabitants to extract food from the surrounding water, in whatever way they could. It’s environment driving evolution, in this case not of species, but of fishing techniques.

  It was also in the Solomons where I learned spider-web fishing. My tutor was James, a village elder with a gravelly voice, a permanent semi-smile and a faded blue baseball cap, who first of all gave me a small Y-shaped stick, like a catapult without the elastic. Having found the spider we were looking for, a mean-looking thing whose long black legs sported bulbous yellow joints, I carefully set about winding its tough silk across the arms of the stick. Then I held this in the heat of a fire and attached it to the end of a cord. Meanwhile James stitched together dried leaves into a dart-shaped kite, and we were ready to go. Out on the water we were greeted by a flat calm, but after a long paddle to the mouth of the lagoon we found a gentle breeze and a slight ripple. James launched the kite, and we angled our course so that the spider-web lure, dangling on its cord beneath the kite, tripped across the surface on a parallel track to the canoe. Suspended from the air, it was seemingly connected to nothing, and as we guided it out of the blue water into the turquoise shallows above the reef, the kite dipped, and James started slowly retrieving, hand over hand. All the while, now, he quietly whistled, clucked and talked to the fish that was flexing and splashing on the line. Then he reached into the water and grabbed the narrow snout of a two-foot needlefish. Its teeth were hooked and tangled into the web–the unlikeliest catch of any spider.

  But the pressure to innovate was also strong elsewhere. Somewhere along the way early humans learned to make baskets, like the open-topped cones they still use in the Congo. You thrust this all the way down to the weeds on the bottom, then reach inside to see what you’ve got–and hope it’s not an electric catfish. More sophisticated are basket traps, usually a large container with an entrance in the form of a funnel. The advantage of these is that you can set a number of them in the evening, along the edge of a river, with the opening facing downstream, and come back for your catch in the morning. They also found out about poison: dig up a root, such as the Amazonian timbó, beat it on a rock to release the milky sap, then jump in the water and collect
the stricken fish at your leisure. And of course there are nets, originally made from woven vegetable fibers, knotted together. Seine nets hang from the surface to the bottom and are dragged by a team of fishermen to encircle the fish. Gill nets can be left to fish passively, catching fish whose size is determined by the size of the mesh. The earliest known net, found near present-day St. Petersburg, dates from around 10,300 years ago, but there must have been earlier nets that didn’t get preserved.

  And at some unknown point or points, fishing technology took a new direction. The first step in this direction was a device known as a gorge. This is a double-ended spike made of wood or bone, normally about three inches long, with a notch in the middle, around which a line is tied. This spike is threaded under the skin of a small fish, which is then thrown in the water, and if a bigger fish swallows this bait, a pull on the line frees the gorge, which gets stuck sideways in the fish’s throat. It’s brutal but it works, and it’s simple to make. I’ve seen one in an archaeological museum in Ethiopia and in the hands of a present-day fisherman in the Amazon.

  But a gorge is crude; it has limited effectiveness. Its significance, however, is huge, because it marks a conceptual leap. It is the evolutionary stepping-stone to the invention that we all use today: the thing that became known as an angle, because it was bent, or had a corner–what we know now as a hook. The people who first used these things were the first anglers.

  To the modern angler, hooks seem so obvious. You can make your own from a bent pin. But if you had the idea in the Stone Age, before the availability of metal, you were a bit like Leonardo da Vinci sketching a helicopter before the invention of the internal combustion engine. A hook has to be fine and strong. What pre-metallic material are you going to make it out of? The oldest known hooks were made 23,000 years ago. They were found in a cave in Okinawa–another isolated island, part of present-day Japan–and were made of snail shell, a naturally curving structure. But it’s likely that the first hooks were fashioned from wood, including from thorn bushes, where there’s a strong, angled point that’s ready-made. Looking elsewhere in nature, inventive fishermen in New Guinea noticed the sharp, curved spines on the legs of certain insects. Native Americans used the talons of hawks. On Easter Island, in the middle of the South Pacific, they used stone and human bones, in the absence of other large mammals. More sophisticated hooks were made by whipping shaped pieces of wood together. A dramatic example is the design used near New Guinea until just a few generations ago, where two sharply acute angles are combined, using a tight whipping of coconut-fiber twine, to form something that prefigures modern circle hooks.