by Jeremy Wade
The river, though, when I got there, was raging and brown. Would it even be possible to present a bait without it being swept away? I was after a goonch catfish (Bagarius yarelli, sometimes known as the giant devil catfish), a creature whose broad wedge of a head and massive pectoral fins make it perfectly designed for hugging the bottom in fast water. But even goonch will take the quiet life if it’s on offer. And the least crazy water I could see looked to be where the river broadened into a pool, between a wall of rock on one side and a boulder beach on the other.
On the beach side there was a long, elliptical eddy, with the current near the bank running counter to the main flow. But a river is more than surface; it exists in three dimensions. At the entrance to the pool I knew there was a sudden falling-away to deeper water, so beneath the surface rush I reasoned that there must also be some kind of vertical eddy going on. If so, a bait cast diagonally from the boulders into the middle of the flow, with the rod held high to keep as much line clear of the water as possible, and just a moderate amount of weight, might conceivably hold position. I wouldn’t know until I tried.
But this was only half the challenge. How would I get a fish out? The combination of big fish and current would be irresistible, even with my nine-foot uptide rod and the big Policansky multiplier, loaded with thick 90lb mono. (Braided line here would have been asking for a cut-off on the sharp-edged rocks down below.)
This is the main ‘what if’ on a river: a big fish bolting downstream. Sometimes, if your gear is up to it, you can stop the run and slowly get your line back. Other times, though, if you just stand there, you will see the line empty from your reel, until there is a loud crack and it falls slack. This is unacceptable on two counts: you have deservedly lost a fish that you shouldn’t have tried to catch in the first place, and the fish is undeservedly left trailing a length of line. Alternatively the fish may stop before you run out of line, but the situation is a stalemate: it has gone around a rock or into a snag, and you are in no position to do anything about it, other than pull for a break. Or you manage to stop the fish, clear of any snags, but the weight of current prevents you from bringing it back upstream.
To avoid these outcomes you need to chase after the fish, and the quicker the better. In some places you can follow along the bank, but in many places you can’t, thanks to obstacles such as fallen trees. So you wade along the water margin–but wadeable water has a habit of suddenly turning unwadeable. Or you follow by boat (perhaps you’re already fishing from a boat), but you must have things ready so you can cast off quickly. Then you need to maneuver the boat and operate the rod at the same time. There may be places where you can manage both on your own, but if you want to maximize your chances, you’ll need a competent and well briefed boatman. In other places, not having someone else control the boat is plain crazy. If your options are ‘none of the above,’ you’re stuck.
And here in India, after traveling more than 4,000 miles to be here, my fish-chasing options looked non-existent. At the downstream end of the boulder beach the bank became impassable. Jagged rock climbed to form a towering cliff; the thought of traversing it, even without a rod, was a joke. Wading was also out of the question, because the water at the side was too deep.
Then I looked again at the river’s chaotic skin, and saw a possible answer. It was all about those countercurrents: the deep, invisible one in the middle and the eddy at the side. If I held the fish hard, I could get the current to work in my favor. If I could just hold it from where all the water funneled and surged out of the pool, I could land a big fish without moving from the boulders. But I still had to have a contingency plan–in case that didn’t work.
There was one option of last resort. I thought back to some of the times I’d jumped in after a fish. Once was to free a big carp in the middle of the night when the line caught around trailing tree branches. I remembered my clothes clinging and my feet sinking into liquid ooze. Treading water with the rod in one hand and the other hand disentangling the line was borderline reckless, but the carp I extracted turned out to be the biggest one in the lake.
I’d also swum in the Kaveri River a few times, in South India, when fishing for mahseer. As a rule it’s not advisable to get into powerful, rocky rivers, but if you do, there are some important things to remember. First, you need to be a competent swimmer, used to swimming in moving water. You need to know that too many clothes will drag you down; anything more than shorts and a T-shirt is a bad idea. (I learned that one at age twelve, when I had to jump in a swimming pool wearing pajamas.) Then there’s the thing that everybody should know, if they are ever likely to find themselves tipped into fast water, voluntarily or involuntarily (perhaps having fallen out of a boat). This is: never put your feet down–until you have reached quiet, slow water at the side. Floating on your back, ideally wearing a life jacket, with your feet in front of you is best, especially for bouncing off any rocks that might be in the way. But if you try to put your feet down it’s all too easy for one of them to find its way into a gap between rocks, or under a wedged branch, whereupon the weight of water will trap it there and fold you under. What’s more, this can happen in surprisingly shallow water. Even waist-deep can do it, and in very strong current even a life jacket won’t keep one’s head above water.
The other thing I’d learned on the Kaveri was the importance of checking out the water downstream, if there was any chance I might end up going in. There I’d not only walked the rocky banks of the rapids; I’d also gone down by coracle, so I knew where the big underwater rocks were, and the slacks where you could pull out of the current. I’d also learned to recognize water that you really shouldn’t get in at all.
Looking in front of me now, the water was borderline. Once I committed myself there could be no turning back, and the nearest crawling-out point was on the far bank. So I would have a long one-handed swim ahead. In the current, my course would be an extravagant diagonal, bringing me to the edge of a huge boulder-field on the inside of a bend. Once here, though, I would be in a good position for rejoining the battle. But if the river swept me past my intended landfall–what then? Would I be tumbled down a waterfall or caught by a deadly ‘strainer’? (This is the kayaker’s term for the branches of a fallen tree, which catch floating objects then hold them, while the weight of the water pushes them under.) The answer was good news. Yes, there was white water in the distance downstream, but before that, after the bend, there was an eddy and slack water. It looked like I had my contingency plan. It was a little bit crazy, but it wasn’t complete insanity.
This, then, is the background to the moment, in the first ever River Monsters episode, when I announce, while ripping off my radio-microphone, ‘I’m going to have to go for a swim!’ Despite appearances to the contrary, it was not a moment of unpremeditated folly, but something I had thought through beforehand–even though I’d hoped it would never come to that.
And it so nearly didn’t come to that. Using the turbulence and countercurrents, I managed to keep the fish that I hooked in the main central area of the pool. But then it came up in the water and started to inch towards the funnel. As I shuffled to the end of the boulders, I tried to heave it into a pocket of slack at the base of the rock. It very nearly worked, but then it showed me a huge tail and accelerated away in the flow.
There was no time to hesitate. In the water, with my eyes now just inches above the surface, the distance to the far bank multiplied and the world became a blur of movement. I had a sudden urge to turn back, but behind me now was the current-scoured base of the cliff. This meant–how did I forget this?–I was now in a band of water that was regularly hit by whistling rockfall. So I kicked and pulled, kicked and pulled–a low-in-the-water one-armed side-stroke that appeared to produce no forward component to my movement. Around me the surface was moving crazily in all directions, but I kept going and there came a point, at last, when it became smooth and slow and my knees bumped the bottom. I crawled out and staggered to my feet and tightened down
to the weight that was still on the line. As I increased the pressure the fish slowly came towards me, until the line was going almost vertically down, into a deep slack near the bank. At this point, the fish became immovable, nine or ten feet down. This wasn’t a snag, but the sheer weight and water-resistance of the fish, broad-headed and negatively buoyant and motionless on the sandy bottom. Even with my heavy gear, there was no way I could lift a goonch this size through the water column.
By this time Alam, one of my guides from the nearby village, was at my side. Twenty-five years previously, I’d experienced a similar stalemate, when a small goonch took a spoon fished on light spinning gear and 11lb line. Eventually I’d landed it 250 yards downstream, thanks in part to the tactic I decided to use now. I asked Alam to pick up a brick-sized boulder and very carefully lob it in the water, a couple of feet to the left of where the fish seemed to be–making sure not to hit the line. A couple of well aimed rocks later, the fish did exactly what I wanted: it swam to the right, up a slope into shallower water.
This was the precise moment when I became aware of someone behind me. All this time, James Bickersteth had been racing to get here with the camera. That was the one thing I hadn’t thought about: in the world of documentary film-making, if it didn’t happen on camera it didn’t happen–and no way was James ever going to get here by water. So he scrambled up a slippery hillside and started running: over a bridge, along a mountainside road, then down a mud path and across the expanse of the boulder field. He arrives and frames up just as Alam reaches down into the opaque water and finds the fish’s tail. As he grabs and pulls, a massive head rears above the surface. The thing is as big as me, a nightmare vision of tentacled ugliness. I drop the rod and grab its wing-like pectorals. We have it.
Not all plans are so extreme. Fishing for Nile perch in Uganda, beneath the thundering Murchison Falls, I was casting a lure from a rocky point. Here again, the risk was a hooked fish getting into the main push of current. If it did so, and I did nothing, my 30lb line would not stop a big fish getting to the next point downstream, about seventy yards distant. Once there it could easily go around the corner, behind the rock, and cut the line.
So my plan, if it started heading that way, which it almost certainly would, was to run as quickly as possible along the uneven bank and try to get adjacent to it. From here, I could more effectively pull it off course. It’s all about vectors. Pulling the fish’s head sideways, rather than just pulling against the direction of travel, is a much more effective way to turn it.
I’d had a small tap on the lure at the end of one cast, but further casts, fanned out methodically in front of me, had provoked no reaction. The director said we needed to move. But something made me throw out ‘one last cast.’
With the rod held high I guided the lure towards the place where it had been knocked, a gap between two fingers of rock. The take came just a few feet out, and felt quite gentle, perhaps because the fish was chasing the lure towards me. Even when it turned it felt small. But then there was a sickening plunge, and off it charged downstream.
My plan worked perfectly at first. By running down the bank and pulling from the side, I turned the fish just before the point of no return, bringing it into a big eddy. But then the fish entered the countercurrent and swam fast upstream. I had to run after it, past my original position, and when I got alongside it had reached the base of some white water, where I felt the line grating on sunken rocks. This was when I was glad I’d put a tough fluoro leader on the end of my line. Instead of a sickening falling slack, I felt the fish start to come towards me. Minutes later its huge circular mouth appeared on the surface of a foam-topped slack, and shortly after that my guide Echie and I managed to safely beach it, without ourselves or the fish getting chomped by one of the notorious resident crocs.
It weighed 112 pounds, the biggest Nile perch that I know of to be caught on a lure fished from the shore, in running water.
And, again, what made the difference between a fish on the bank and a monster never seen was something small, and easily overlooked: the small matter of a few minutes’ observation and thought before casting.
11
Poke the Apple
One moment to get it right. One chance. There will be such moments for all of us, and this was one of mine. Up ahead of my motorbike are the lights of a car approaching the road from the left. Arriving at the junction it turns slightly away, into a position where it can pull out behind me after I have passed. But, after appearing to wait, it inexplicably accelerates and slides into my lane, on course to broadside me if I don’t react. Then it turns sharply across me and I’m flying headfirst through the air.
What happens next is almost automatic, the result of hours of practice. I extend my right arm and tuck my head, and when my fingertips touch the tarmac I roll–along the curved length of my arm, diagonally across my back, and down my left thigh to my knees. After being airborne for 51 feet (I measured it later), my leather jacket is shredded and I’ll be walking on sticks for weeks, but my full-face helmet is not even scratched. All I have to do now is crawl as quickly as I can on ripped tendons, and hang on to the car’s hood as it tries to drive away. The driver is not yet aware that his front offside wheel is embedded in the engine.
There is also something embedded in me. It has taken many years to see the connection, but what happened that night has, on a few occasions, helped me catch a fish.
The lake had another name, but in our minds (although we didn’t say it) it was Last Chance Saloon. We were in Guyana, and a week before, near the village, I’d had a fish of about 110 pounds, but for arapaima that doesn’t count as big. It wouldn’t make a fitting finale for our program. A few days after that, having relocated upriver, I’d hooked a big one, but the hook had come out after a couple of spectacular thrashes on the surface. Other than that I’d struggled with no result, largely thanks to chocolate-colored water reducing the visibility of my offering.
But this place looked promising. There was more clarity in the water, and it was only a couple of minutes before we saw a fish surfacing–the arapaima’s giveaway habit of gently rising to gulp air. I was impatient to start, but first we had to assemble the canoe. This was in a bag on my back: a miracle of engineering that I could have done with in my days of dragging and shouldering wooden boats through the jungle–four miles in one case, to catch my first arapaima. This new canoe was a bit like an elongated, upside-down tent: a thick PVC skin held in shape by a frame of flexible metal tubes. The first time we’d tried to put it up, the frame seemed too big for the skin. Every time we managed to shove one of the reluctant, flexing struts inside, another component came twanging back out. But now our ineptitude was a fading memory: Rovin and I had it ready in twenty minutes.
As we slid onto the water, I glanced back enviously at the crew’s alloy skiff, with its forgiving stability and seats that would have made ideal casting platforms. For once they weren’t using it, thanks to a raised vantage point on land, where they could follow everything on a long lens–as long as we didn’t disappear around the corner. This, in comparison, was like being chopped off at the knees. My bare feet were below the water line, on a yoga mat that I’d taped over the criss-crossing frame, to lessen the chance of the line snagging, and I wobbled from side to side as I tried to get my sea legs. Sticking to this boat was a handicap dictated by continuity, and that was that. But part of me really liked the idea of getting a fish from this thing. I just had to relax and forget the stakes were so high.
But relaxing wasn’t an option. The circumstances dictated our plan, and our plan was very simple. Rovin and I agreed that I wouldn’t cast at all, unless and until we saw a big fish that we were in a position to cast to. So I stripped fifty feet of fly line off the reel and flaked it neatly on top of the yoga mat, so it would shoot out freely on the first cast… and started scanning the water.
In the front of the boat, I held the fly in my left hand, its tail pinched between thumb and forefinger, well cl
ear of the needle-sharp single hook that was partially concealed by its six-inch bundle of trailing bright fibers. Its dominant color was pale green shading into white, with a belly-flash of orange. Finishing off the job were transverse bars of marker-pen black and two staring eyes stuck to a blob of epoxy resin on the hook’s shank. Like no insect on earth, this was an impressionistic imitation of a fish known throughout the Amazon as the tucunaré, or peacock bass. Just add the ‘fly’ to water, give it a twitch, and it kicks into life.
‘Over there…!’ We’ve both seen it, not far from the edge of the vegetation that tumbles into the water. Then another… and a third. Three in a group, and one is big. Their heads gently kiss the surface, a sign that they are in a relaxed mood; then they burp bubbles of used air from their gills as they sink back down. We wait to see where they will appear next, and slowly track them out into open water, as they make a lazy diagonal towards the opposite bank. Rovin is propelling the canoe from behind, heading for an intercept. As well as getting our position right, he’s also got to align the boat correctly. I can’t shift my feet, so my casting arc is limited: between nine and eleven o’ clock. Pointing the boat directly at the target would have me hooking my driver on the back-cast.
A seventy-pound fish surfaces. Its position is a rough extrapolation of the track we’ve been following, so it’s one of our group. I prepare to toss the fly into the air, like a tennis player winding up for a serve. I mentally rehearse my left hand then moving to synchronize with my right, taking hold of the line and hauling it to load the rod, and releasing for the shoot. The next ripple nearly triggers me, but it’s the second small one. The next thing I see is a fizz of tiny bubbles, spreading into a circle six feet across.