How to Think Like a Fish

by Jeremy Wade

  ‘Cast!’ Rovin hisses. My target is just beyond the bubbles. Adrenaline scours the vessels of my arms as I aerialize the line, push out a false cast (keep steady: it’s looking OK) then another (don’t rush–poke the apple…) and then commit to the final shoot. The big fly sails through the air after the not-too-bad unfolding loop and lands exactly where I wanted.

  I let the fly sink for a moment–the fish will still be near the surface–then start to strip it in, my left hand retrieving eighteen inches at a time into the space between my feet, with brief pauses when I trap the line with my right hand and take a new grip. The fly has traveled maybe fifteen feet when I feel something that is almost too small to be felt, like somebody has flicked the line with their fingernail. Beneath the surface, an immense cavity has opened, sucking water and the swimming creature inside.

  ‘Strip!’ comes the command from behind me, as I go into a different stripping mode, gripping the line tight and pulling back as far as I can. Feeling nothing, I repeat and feel nothing again. As I struggle to process what’s happening I respond to the repeated command, and start to feel a tension, a tension that grows and becomes a weight. But I can’t let up; I have to set the hook. I pull nine, ten, a dozen times–it must be coming towards me–until the line is at full stretch and the fish plunges. It’s the big one.

  At this point I don’t have enough hands. Line jumps up from between my feet and runs hot through the fingers of my right hand where they grip the rod handle, while my left hand switches between disciplining the nest of line in the boat (with bits now hanging over the side) and trying to wind it back on the reel. Meanwhile I’m trying, simultaneously, to keep an eye on those loose coils–a snake with the intention of grabbing anything in sight–and the tight line cutting across the surface.

  It’s a relief when the line is finally tight to the reel. I can now let the drag do its job. The rod also acts as a shock absorber, but I keep it in a flat curve because its lifting power is limited. A couple of times the fish partially lifts itself clear of the water and shakes its head–a violent movement that risks breaking the line or throwing the hook–but each time I ease the tension, and manage to stay connected.

  While all this is happening, Rovin is methodically working the paddle. Even a five-pound fish can spin a small canoe all over the place, and it’s vital that we keep this monster from getting anywhere near the banks, which are heavily overgrown and snaggy. The only exception is the place where we put in, which is where we’ll try to take the fish now, to land it. So our erratic path slowly takes us in that direction, and when the fish’s runs have shortened to a few yards, we nose in and I jump ashore.

  A couple of minutes later, after some grappling in muddy shallows, we have it in our arms. It’s not far off 200 pounds, and our program is in the bag. It’s a program that started with tales of people getting rammed by something in the water, and, as I explain to the camera now, the culprit was one of these. The arapaima is a fish that doesn’t take kindly to anything coming too close to its nest, a crater-like depression that a breeding pair digs in the lakebed. And although it doesn’t have big teeth, the arapaima doesn’t muck about. The blow it can deliver with its sculpted, bony head can be devastating. A male fish will sometimes kill a competing male. A big female, on occasion, will kill a male that she deems to be unworthy of her. And once, eleven years ago, an arapaima that was trying to escape from a net set by fishermen rammed me with such force in the chest that I was sent flying. It was less than half the weight of this one, but I was still hurting a month and a half later. So when I get close now, I make sure that my head is never alongside the fish’s head. This would be in range of a side-swipe when the body flexes, which happens in a blur. I know a man who had his teeth broken in this way and was nearly knocked out. But if I’m above the fish’s head I’m safe–as long as we grip the body securely so it can’t roll onto its side.

  We also don’t want the fish to suffer any long-term effects. So, as always, we don’t overdo the fish handling. The shots proceed at the pace of a pit stop, and afterward we support it with its head just under the surface, so it can easily gulp air when it wants. It rests like this for a minute (with one gulp) before swimming off.

  Then it’s back to business. Bess, our director, wants to get some close-up shots: of the reel, the paddle in the water, my eyes scanning the lake–that kind of thing, so the editor has some options to play with. We can do that just off the bank here. But this isn’t what I want to hear: I explain that there are still fish surfacing, further down the lake. From the way they are showing (not a panicky get-back-down-quick splash) I can tell they are not alarmed, so they’re catchable. There could be a bigger fish with my name on it.

  But, not for the first time on a shoot, I am reminded of our objective in the limited time available: to catch one fish that’s ‘big enough.’ Now we’ve got that, we have other things to do. For once I can’t bear it. Normally I do what I’m told but this time I start begging and wheedling. When this doesn’t work, I try a new tack: ‘Why don’t we do all that stuff, but do it further down the lake with a line in the water? You can all get in the crew boat and we’ll raft up together…’

  To my delight, Bess relents. Then, to no one’s delight, it starts raining. Thanks to my holding things up with my grumpy insubordination, it’s going to be hard for the editor to get these new shots to cut in. But there’s nothing we can do about that, beyond the judicious use of an umbrella, so we set off down the lake.

  On the first couple of casts, trying to intercept fish that have just surfaced, nothing happens. But then there comes that almost subliminal flick. My reflexes now warmed up, I haul on the line until I’ve pulled tight into something immovable. But the answering plunge never comes. I’m hung up on a sunken branch.

  Rather than paddle over and go through the performance of trying to get free, we decide to stay put and get some shots done. In fact, having the line attached to something is actually quite handy: maybe we can do a close-up shot of a bent rod…

  There is a sound like quiet hissing, which turns out to be Rovin, who is trying to attract my attention. Having caught my eye, he nods towards the water, where my line is now making a 90-degree angle with its previous position. The tree is busy relocating itself, traveling steadily up the middle of the lake. I observe blankly for a moment before I make the appropriate response, and tighten down. What follows, after some understandable confusion, is a scaled-up replay of the previous battle, with the early action at long range. Again there are huge boils and breaches at the surface, and heart-in-mouth moments as it turns just short of danger, as the fish slowly tires. The drill at our landing-spot is now familiar, but this fish is less co-operative: there’s an extended round of mud-wrestling before we can get a good look at it. Rovin says 250 pounds, and it feels every ounce of that. And we have our close-up shots. Not just hands and line and moments of waiting, but real dramatic action–an embarrassment of visual riches.

  At some point in the future, in a windowless room, an editor will expertly splice this new footage with the previous catch. Nobody will notice the strangely intermittent rain. It’s an instance of TV sleight of hand that I’m happy to own up to, and something we’ve done on a few other occasions: implying that I caught a single fish when in reality it was two. But normally, for the reasons I’ve given, it really is just one very special fish.

  Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, the day went like this. I flopped that first cast short, and nothing happened. I put another cast out, but it was too late: the fish had moved and it was little better than fishing blind. Then I spent the rest of the day not quite getting it right, and finished up empty handed.

  Why it didn’t end up like that is down to multiple factors combining favorably. Right bait, right place, right time of course–but there are layers of this, plus other details. And where the analysis of a catch gets interesting is in trying to identify the details that were really significant, the ones that were essential for the successful out
come. (This plus this plus this equals no fish. This plus this plus that equals fish.)

  One interesting detail about my second catch was that it took a one-eyed fly (the other eye had fallen off). I could argue that this made it look vulnerable, and the wily arapaima snuck up on its blind side. Nobody could prove me wrong, because it’s never possible to set up a control experiment, where everything is exactly the same apart from that one contested detail. But I’m pretty certain this detail was insignificant. What really counted on this day was the ability to put the fly in the right place at the right moment. And this was all down to something I’d done in the weeks before coming here…

  We are all victims of pigeon-holing, to some extent, but that’s the way our minds work. We like to keep things tidy by compartmentalizing them. But sometimes the right box doesn’t exist, and something gets put into a particular box by default. This is what has happened with angling. You could say this is academic, but I would argue that it is unhelpful to think of angling as a sport, because this can affect the way that angling is approached. To my mind, a sport is primarily physical. Its practitioners are fitter, more agile and more coordinated than the general populace. But there’s no way anglers compare with footballers or competitive cyclists. And that’s OK, because angling is primarily mental. Yes there is a physical side to it, but it’s not the main thing–and that, I think, is the point.

  Looking at it more personally, I’m not particularly athletic and wouldn’t describe myself as any kind of sportsman, but I have always tried to keep myself passably fit and active. I used to plod around a rugby field when I was at school, playing loose-head prop for the first XV, but I stopped doing that as soon as I left school, when it was no longer compulsory. I was also the Gloucestershire schools shot-put champion, but that was because nobody else turned up that day. Basketball was more my thing, despite being only average height (5ft 10½in): my specialty was long shots, from beyond what is now the 3-point line. Apart from that, I’ve always done a bit of running. And for many years I’ve intermittently practiced aikido, a non-violent martial art, mostly derived from jiu-jitsu. It was this which saved me from worse damage that night on my motorbike, when my attacker was 4,000 pounds of metal. So I’m a fairly physical person, which is handy, because any angler needs a certain level of physical stamina and coordination. But in some branches of angling, technique is a major component.

  I grew up as a bait chucker. The opportunities to fly-fish were far between, but there were a few. As a result I developed a rudimentary ability to get a fly out, and a basic understanding of the mechanics, but I was in no way a good caster. When River Monsters came along, most of my fishing was heavy bait fishing, but then some more exotic opportunities presented themselves, including some situations that called for a fly rod. Something had to be done. I watched videos and had a few days’ coaching, plus some tuition from guides on location, and I ended up with a passable technique for the camera–just as long as nobody made the mistake of assuming that I was making any kind of instructional program. And it bore fruit. I managed to catch taimen and grayling in Mongolia, dorado in Argentina, carp, bowfin and long-nosed gar in the US, and big tarpon in Nicaragua–from a float tube, no less.

  But arapaima were going to be something else. Time would be very limited and I had to catch a fish. What to do? I recalled my brother telling me about a party he’d been to, where he’d got talking to a former fly-casting coach, a Japanese gentleman who had moved to our small town from Paris. It sounded highly unlikely, but I made a couple of phone calls, and that’s how I found myself standing in a field with Atsushi Hasegawa.

  Atsushi had brought a couple of his rods with him, delicate (three-weight?) wands that he uses on tiny, overgrown rivers. He stood back and scrutinized me as I attempted to reproduce his exquisite aerial calligraphy, and answered my questions about what had brought him halfway around the world to here. He told me that originally he’d worked at the L. L. Bean tackle store in Tokyo, where he would give an hour’s casting tuition to every customer who bought a fly rod. From there he’d landed a job at Maison de la Mouche, on Île Saint-Louis in Paris, renowned purveyor of fishing gear to Ernest Hemingway and other notables, where part of his job was giving casting lessons on the Seine. Then he married an English girl and picked up the thread of his previous career in fashion design. His day job now was in design management, for a global footwear brand.

  Eventually it was time for the heavy lifting. As I hefted and unzipped the bag containing my 12-weight reel, his eyes widened. ‘It’s like a Christmas cake!’ he exclaimed. Minutes later, despite never having cast with gear this heavy, he was shooting all the line out, into the backing. It was a blistering demonstration of something I knew in theory but had never seen so consummately put into practice: with casting, the key thing is not physical strength–he is not a large man–but getting the rod to do the work. That was the thing that I was struggling with, as I huffed and puffed to get half the distance. Once in a while something went semi-right, and I felt a glimmer of pent-up life in the rod, but I was mostly unable to tell what I was doing right or wrong.

  Patiently Atsushi watched, giving me words of guidance, and the OK casts started to come more frequently. Periodically he would make me stop–to rest, to watch, and mentally absorb. During one of these breaks, he said, ‘Imagine there’s an apple tree behind you…’

  As I tried to picture it, he continued. ‘You are hitting the apple. I want you to think of the end like… a spear.’ He showed me what he meant. After stopping the back cast it was just a small move, back and a little up–more of a gentle poke than anything else, into the imaginary fruit. It took a while to sink in, but over the course of the next three weeks, as I practiced in a different field, the thought of the apple behind me worked a subtle magic on my casting. The rod was loading more at the end of the back cast. I was feeling, and starting to use, the formidable spring in the carbon fiber, achieving more and more distance for less effort. I was, in the parlance, correcting a problem of ‘creep’ (anticipating the forward cast) and converting it into the magical refinement known as ‘drift.’ Then I started working on accuracy. Aim for that leaf, then that one over there. I knew I would never achieve the mastery of a true expert, but I knew enough about the importance of right-first-time casting to know that this was vital work.

  It’s particularly important in some lure fishing. In recent years I have become a big fan of fishing with a baitcasting outfit: throwing a lure with a short, whippy rod and a small multiplier reel. And the most exciting fishing of this kind, in my experience, is casting topwater lures for peacock bass (the same species that my arapaima fly was mimicking). Often you’re working from a drifting boat, trying to cast into holes in the bankside vegetation, which open up just for the few seconds that you are alongside. This means being bold. But if you throw just a little too long you’re hung up on a branch, so you’ve blown that spot. Do this too many times and you end up dropping short, for safety. But this isn’t where the fish are: you’re now ignoring one of the three fundamentals. Repeatedly casting in the wrong place is hardly a recipe for success.

  If you’re lucky enough to be doing this kind of fishing regularly, you should eventually reach and maintain a certain level of competence. You might even achieve that zen-like state where you don’t think about technique at all: you just look at your target and your lure goes there. But if you only do this kind of fishing intermittently, with long breaks in between, there’s a problem. What normally happens, in compliance with one of those lesser-known laws of nature, is that you’re just starting to get the hang of it on your last day, just before it’s time to pack up and go home. But what a waste of time on the water this is! How many potential opportunities have been missed? Is there any way to avoid this?

  The answer is simple and obvious, but frequently not applied. Instead of perfecting technique in a situation where this means missing opportunities, do it in advance of the fishing trip, in a setting where mistakes don’t carry
any cost. With no pressure on, you can afford to be meticulous, slow and thoughtful. Positive feedback will sharpen your skill, closer and closer to the point where you are capable, almost without thinking, of seizing a once-only opportunity–of making that first cast count.

  Hence my daily casting in a field, aiming at leaves, with an imaginary apple tree behind me, before I took off for Guyana.

  12

  Thou Shalt Knot

  They are the cheapest components of your fishing gear. They cost nothing to make. But made badly they can cost everything.

  Fishing knots are very different from those used by climbers and sailors. All knots depend on friction, but the smooth surface of nylon monofilament slips easily against itself. Two lengths of fishing line joined by a reef knot are easily pulled apart. To provide enough friction for the knot to lock, fishing knots normally use multiple turns.

  I have no idea how many fishing knots there are, but I do know that it’s not necessary to know all of them, or even most of them. This is because there’s a very limited number of jobs that you will want a fishing knot to do, and for the main functions there are several alternatives. In the old days, before braided line and fluorocarbon, you could select one knot for each function and stick to it. But different knots work differently with different types, and thicknesses, of line, so nowadays things are a little more complicated.

  There are actually just two main things that you need to master: attaching line to a small loop (the eye of a hook or swivel) and joining two pieces of line together. Learn a few different knots for doing these two things, for different materials, and that’s pretty much it.

  Once in a while, further down the line, you may need to rig something a bit specialized, for which you’ll need to learn something new, but your knot collection never needs to be very extensive. It is far better to know how to tie a few knots well than it is to have a vast repertoire.