How to Think Like a Fish

by Jeremy Wade

  This is the history that is embodied in the small item that defines our pastime. And it’s a heritage that it’s sometimes good to reflect on, as I did that day on the Luangwa, because it says so much about what is central to angling, and what we should aspire to as anglers. So what is that central something?

  Angling, in essence, is about converting something very insignificant (the bait, with negligible or even zero food value, maybe a worm that has been dug up or a few colorful but inedible fibers) into something very substantial: a fish big enough to feed a family. It could even be expressed as a mathematical equation: energy input (measured in calories or joules) + x = energy output. And the magic catalyst x that makes this apparent alchemy possible, this creation of something from nothing, is… human inventiveness and ingenuity.

  This is something we all have, baked into our DNA and yearning for expression, and it’s the part of our nature that should always be engaged when we are on the water, constantly interrogating the particular problem that we are trying to solve. Even when fishing a tried-and-trusted method, in a known place, this part of us should not be dormant and shut away, because no two sets of circumstances are exactly the same. What brings the big fish is an artful blend of drawing on experience and keeping an open, active mind. The secret ingredient is as simple as that.

  7

  Less Time Is More

  I was on the Rio Tocantins, one of the Amazon’s southern tributaries, on a thirty-foot wooden fishing boat that had been hired for the day, and I needed a fish or two for the cameras. Anything would do, as long as it took a couple of hands to hold, as an appetizer for the program’s main course, which this time was going to be an electric eel. But I’d not been here before and it was a big river, some 400 yards wide at this point and flowing strongly. So when the boatmen said they’d take us to some good fishing spots, I was happy to go along with this. They duly motored off downstream, and after traveling for well over an hour we pulled in to the bank and moored up. But the current was so strong that I couldn’t get my bait, a small piece of cut dead fish, to hold bottom. Only after putting on a lot more weight and casting close to the bank could I get it to stay down. Although it didn’t feel very promising, I persevered for an hour or so, but nothing showed any interest.

  So they unhitched the boat and took us to a new location, where the result was the same. The boatmen then said I should have brought some shrimps, which started a fevered conversation about where we could get shrimps. But casual eavesdropping had given me some other information. They’d been given their directions by somebody else, and they were struggling to work them out. We were just fishing places at random. It was time to abandon local intelligence and go back to first principles.

  I asked them to start heading back upriver. As is normal when traveling against the flow, we kept just a short distance out from the bank, far enough to avoid running aground or hitting any sunken trees but close enough to benefit from the slower current here. After half an hour I found what I was looking for, and asked them to drop the anchor, about forty yards out from the bank. Despite some skepticism, the anchor held, and I waited for the boat to settle. Putting on a fresh piece of bait, I cast it a short distance down the line of the current. After paying out a little line I felt the 3oz lead bump down on the bottom and come to a rest.

  The first bite came very quickly, and I swung in a chunky black piranha weighing about a pound. With my fingernail I carefully exposed the lower teeth for the obligatory dental close-up. Then it went back and everybody relaxed. We had a conclusion to our scene. But we still had some time, so I recast.

  Mere minutes later, there was something much heavier on the line, dragging the rod-tip to within inches of the surface. Grudgingly it came up in the water and revealed itself as a stingray, two feet across and nearly twenty pounds. Transferring to our small launch, I towed it to the sandy shore, where we could safely get a better look at it. All the way along the top of its tail were vicious looking half-inch spikes. Then, just short of the end, its main weapon: a five-inch spine like a finely serrated dagger. But that wasn’t the most striking thing about this fish. Most river stingrays are drab, and blend in with the riverbed. This, coupled with their habit of hunting in extreme shallows, is why they are so feared–because they are so easy to step on. This one was striking in another way: on a background color of deep midnight black swirled a galaxy of yellow suns. It’s surely an example of warning coloration, but it also has a hypnotic effect. On the exotic fish market, some spotted rays change hands for thousands of dollars.

  This one, of course, went back in the river. But, even so, it was of huge value to us, because we now had a great payoff for our Tocantins sequence. Without any fish, all the footage shot that day would have ended up on the cutting room floor, so the relief was tangible–as was the new appreciation, after the initial doubt, of my fish-finding powers. In my smugness I felt like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple rolled into one, even though what I’d done, in this case, was not really detective work. I’d just applied some basic watercraft. But from the perspective of a non-angler I’d performed a trick worthy of a great magician. And like a magician I was reluctant to explain the trick, because once you’ve seen it, it’s obvious…

  Meanwhile the prime moral of this story is not hard to miss. Fish where the fish are (the right place), not where they aren’t (the wrong place). But how do you know where they are? A lot of the time you don’t–but you can narrow it down.

  Here’s a conversation I had a few times when I first started fishing with non-anglers in tow:

  DIRECTOR: ‘Why aren’t you fishing?’

  PISCATOR: ‘I am fishing.’

  Everybody else is ready for action, but I’m just standing there, looking at the water. I haven’t even started to rig a line. Unfortunately this doesn’t make for good TV. I try to explain that what I’m doing is vital. But what am I doing exactly?

  I know why they’re asking: I can feel the urgency. They think I’m wasting time. While I stand there doing nothing, that precious resource is slipping away. I’m up against the popular view of fishing: that it’s like playing a slot machine. The more times you pull the handle, the more chance you have of hitting the jackpot. In other words, hurry up and get a line in the water. Having gone to such trouble and expense to come all this way, surely I should be maximizing actual bait-in-water fishing time.

  I try to explain that this is one of those yes-and-no things. If everything else is equal, then yes, it makes sense to maximize the rod-hours. But if the bait is not in the right place, then no amount of time is likely to yield a result. Better to spend some of the available time determining the right place to put the bait.

  To this end there are three levels of on-site information I am after. The first is actually seeing fish. Sometimes you can’t miss them: they jump or break the surface, or they’re right there in front of you. But normally you have to look. Looking into water takes practice. The surface acts as a partial mirror, which means a lot of interference from reflected light. So I wear polarizing sunglasses to block the worst of this surface glare. Blocking out the sky from my field of view also helps, either with a hand or a peaked hat. This lets my pupils open up, which allows more light, and hence more information, to reach the light-sensitive cells in my retina. I can now see much more detail in the water. But still, in places, the surface is a psychological barrier. This is because our eyes automatically focus on what is most obvious, which may be surface debris or whatever is reflected in the surface. But it’s possible to train our eyes to override this tendency.

  One of my many short-term jobs was unloading stuff from delivery trucks for a big auto accessories shop. At the back of the shop, there was a two-way mirror, behind which was the manager’s office. This mirror was the old-fashioned type, with vertical strips of clear glass punctuating the silver. Looking at it from the brightly lit shop, customers would see themselves reflected. But if you made your eyes defocus, you would suddenly see into the darker office
behind. And once your focus had latched on to something at this deeper level, it was easy to keep it there. (Modern half-silvered mirrors are more difficult. You have to press your face against them and shield your eyes with cupped hands, which is hard to do in a casual, offhand manner.) For looking into water, it’s the same thing as in the shop. Make your focus hunt beyond the surface, until you find something like an underwater weed stem to fix your new focal length. Then start looking for fish.

  But often you won’t see a whole fish. You’ll see a partial shape. Commonly this will be a very faint edge, where the dark outline of a fish’s back meets the slightly less dark coloration of the water. This difference in tone can be almost non-existent, right on the threshold of what the eye can distinguish. Our eyes, however, are very good at seeing this kind of contrast, but only if the edge is in sharp focus. If our focal plane is too close or too far away, this edge will be blurred. In this case we can be looking right at a fish but not seeing it. There’s also the problem, if we’re new to this, that we don’t know what we’re looking for until we see it. So we should check out any anomaly, any discontinuity in the texture of the water, anything that makes us do a double-take. In this way, over time, the more we will see, and the more we will know what to look for, until we are seeing fish that are invisible to less-practiced eyes.

  To spot fish in this way it’s necessary to scan the water, using the central, most sensitive part of your retina. But while you’re doing this, your peripheral vision will be alert for any movement, and you must be ready to go with the natural reflex to look towards anything moving at the edge of your vision. It should also go without saying that fish spotting should be done in a stealthy manner, so as not to scare away or alarm any fish you see, or don’t see. Start by looking close in, before looking further away. There have been times, even on well fished waters, when I’ve crept up on carp just inches from the bank.

  The second level of information is signs of fish, created by fish you can’t see: tiny ripples, bubbles, twitching weeds, or coloring of the water. Or miniature whirlpools spun from a waving tail. For seeing these in the distance, it’s very handy to carry binoculars. And don’t forget to listen: a sound can be the thing that alerts you to a jump, a swirl, or a fish taking food from the surface. Hands cupped behind the ears will amplify sound, and I often adopt the practice of jungle hunters, of opening my mouth to give a marginal, but maybe critical, increase in sensitivity.

  For even better spotting, I like to get up high. Climbing a tree cuts reflected glare and lets me see deeper down, enabling me to spot things I’d otherwise miss. Once in Alaska I went spotting pike from a float plane. We found some in a weedy bay, and I returned to catch a forty-inch fish nearby.

  Then there’s reading the water itself, to work out indirectly where the fish might be. I find rivers easier to read than lakes, because the surface tells you what the current is doing. And what the current is doing determines, to a large extent, where the fish will be. To a fish, the current is like a wind, and mostly they prefer not to be in the places where it’s blowing a gale. As well as in the obvious slacks, shelter can be found in some surprising places. I remember one place in India, where the Kaveri River funneled into a rocky channel just a few yards wide, where the current was so powerful that it was hard to imagine any fish holding position. Right in the middle of the flow was a roaring eruption of white water, betraying the presence of a submerged rock. I swung in a lightly weighted deadbait upstream of this spot and instead of being swept past by the flow it got sucked down behind the rock, where it was taken straight away by a thirty-eight-pound mahseer. Fish will also lie in small hollows in the riverbed, with the current flowing over their backs, but these places can’t be found by reading the surface. This calls for some extrasensory perception, in the form of sonar.

  While sonar can be very useful (if you can get out in a boat) for building an accurate picture of depths and locating features such as sandbars and sunken trees (and sometimes fish), it’s possible to make some educated guesses just by looking at the river’s shape. Deeper water tends to be on the outside of bends, where steeper banks provide a further clue. On forest rivers, these deep margins can be quite snaggy, thanks to erosion undermining trees and causing them to fall in. Fishing on the fringe of these snags can be productive, but tackle should be beefed up accordingly. On some big rivers there are also navigation markers, which help to keep track of where the deeper water is. These markers were very helpful on one Congo tributary that I fished, where the underwater topography was complex and unpredictable. There were places in the middle of the river where, in the dry season, the water was knee deep. Meanwhile the deep-water channel meandered from one side of the river to the other in a way that sometimes seemed to follow no logic. And it changed from year to year, thanks to floodwaters rearranging the sandbars.

  Change also happens over a shorter timescale, in rivers of all sizes. Even a small rise or fall in water level can subtly change the shape of the banks, and this will affect the current. If a straight bank acquires a bulge, this will deflect the flow, and this will have a knock-on effect downstream. So it’s always good practice to check what the current is doing before casting, rather than assuming that the fish will be in the same place where they were last time. As Heraclitus would have said, if he’d been an angler: you never cast into the same river twice, because it is not the same river. In fact, if you really look, you’ll see that the current can change from minute to minute. I remember a pool on the Kali River in India where the quiet water near a large rock on the bank was visited at intervals by a shifting current line, complete with sucking whirlpools. So to get a good feeling of the current-scape that the fish have to deal with, it needs more than just a quick glance at the water.

  On lakes it’s harder to deduce where the fish might be. But the absence of current makes it easier to spot actual signs of fish–a fin-tip touching the surface, coloring of the water, a fleeting patch of calm amidst ripples–so I spend more time looking for these things. But there are other things that help to narrow down the search. As a rule, unless it is too cold, I like to fish into the wind. Wind creates a circulation of the surface water, and where the wind hits the bank there will be a warm, well oxygenated layer reaching deep beneath the surface. Not only that, the turbulence this creates stirs up sediment on the bottom, which washes small food items into suspension, which in turn brings in the small fish at the bottom of the food chain. Features such as weed beds, islands, sunken trees, sand- and gravel bars and gullies can also attract fish. Again, look at the contours of the banks, and mentally extrapolate. Normally a steep bank means deep water close in, and a gently sloping bank indicates shallow water. But this isn’t always reliable: I can think of a couple of places where a sheer rock cliff rose out of a couple of feet of water. So hunches about depth should be checked, either with sonar or by plumbing. Another handy device is a bathyscope, basically a bucket with a clear plastic bottom. Held in the water, this can sometimes enable you to see the contours and nature of the bottom.

  In short, whenever I go fishing, I look for clues that will help me build a mental picture of the underwater geography. And a key part of this picture is the water itself: how it moves, and how it varies from place to place in terms of temperature, oxygen content, light intensity and suspended matter. In other words I try to go beyond the mere shape of the water-body, as defined by its container, and visualize the internal, dynamic ‘structure’ of the water. This may sound obvious, but to most modern humans water is just homogenous ‘stuff,’ and it requires a mental shift to see it differently. This alternative view of water is perfectly summarized by the sea gypsies of south-east Asia, who navigate long distances on the open ocean without instruments. Water, they say, is not a space but a place.

  Having built up a mental picture of the underwater land- and waterscape, based on as much information as I can gather, I’m now able to place a bait strategically, rather than at random. This process, of trying to find the f
ish or a specific, likely spot or area, is something we should always do before we cast a line. But too often it’s skipped, through laziness or complacency. Or–most commonly?–it’s the impatience to get a line in the water. In my case, that impatience can come from other people, and because this is a real, audible voice, rather than an internal murmur, it’s something I’ve had to confront and challenge. And what this has done, oddly, is almost make me welcome having limited time. It creates a real sense of urgency and, in a very literal sense–if allowed to–it concentrates the mind. It brings about focus, to an extent that might not otherwise be there. It makes me think, and think hard, before I act–because whenever I’ve got a line in the water, I always want to feel that I am fishing effectively. It’s whenever I don’t have that feeling that I’m wasting everyone’s time.