How to Think Like a Fish

by Jeremy Wade

  I sometimes use a Bimini twist for forming a length of double line at the end of the main line, to which I attach the leader. The Bimini twist is one of those very rare knots that have 100 percent knot strength. Tested to destruction, the break will occur somewhere else. It’s also a forgiving knot; it’s strong even if you tie it badly. But of course that’s no reason to ever tie it badly.

  To make a loop in a double line you can use the surgeon’s loop (double overhand knot). Simply double the end of the double line and make an overhand knot, then go through again to make a double overhand knot. Knot strength is only in the order of 50–75 percent, so it’s OK to use with a double line but not a great choice for single line, where a non-slip loop knot (see below) is much better. An alternative to the surgeon’s loop for double line is the figure-eight knot.

  To join two loops together, the simplest way is an ordinary loop-to-loop connection, which beds down to look like a reef knot. But it’s much better to use a cat’s paw, where you pass the end of the leader through the loop once more, then again as many times as you like, although three may be enough. This increases the surface area of the two lines in contact, and spreads the load. I used this method for connecting my fly line to my backing when fly-fishing for arapaima, where the backing was 90lb braid with an end loop formed by a Bimini twist. The final detail here was feeding the end of the braid through a sleeve of hollow Dacron before tying the Bimini twist, to remove any risk of the thin braid cutting into the Dacron loop on the end of the fly line. For this, and most of my knowledge about how to put together heavy fly-fishing gear, I’m indebted to Daniel Göz, the man who put me onto Nicaraguan tarpon.

  Still with heavy fly-fishing, often it’s desirable to mount a fly (or a lure) on an open loop, so it swims more naturally. For arapaima I used a non-slip loop knot, and on the other end of my 80lb mono leader was a perfection loop, for making a quick loop-to-loop connection with the fly line. If this is tied correctly, the tag end should project from the knot at 90 degrees. Don’t trim the tag end too short. Meanwhile the loop on the end of the fly line is made by doubling the end of the line and fixing it with two or three small nail knots, tied with 12–30lb mono and sealed with epoxy adhesive.

  And finally there’s one knot for rope. The highwayman’s hitch is a quick-release knot for mooring your boat. Knowing and tying this knot can on occasion make the difference between landing and losing a fish. I use it if there’s any likelihood of having to chase after a fish. What makes it extra handy is that it can be tied one-handed. Just make sure the tag end is long enough for you to reach easily when you’ve got a bent rod in the other hand.

  There may also be occasions when you want to up-anchor quickly. But this takes time, and clearly you don’t want to lose the anchor, so you can’t just drop the rope. A simple solution is to tie a buoy, such as an empty plastic container, to the anchor rope. You can now cast off and chase the fish and pick up the anchor later. This was key to my capture of a 300-pound white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) from the Columbia River in the US Pacific Northwest, which was otherwise set to run out all the line and bust the 40lb backing.

  And that’s it for knots, apart from a few miscellaneous tips. Don’t cut off a knot hard against a swivel, if you plan to use the swivel again. If the scissors scratch the metal of the swivel, this might damage the line of a future knot, and even a small chance of that happening is best avoided. Always inspect your hook to check that the eye is fully closed, and discard it if the gap looks too big. On occasion I’ve tied a second knot with light line and forced it into this gap, then trimmed it clean. Or close the gap with epoxy adhesive. For cutting braid invest in special braid scissors, because braid will quickly blunt normal scissors, which will lead to messy cuts. Before retying a knot in the main line or leader, first check the line–for several feet in the case of main line. If there are any scuffs, nicks or bad kinks, cut the damaged line off. (With a thick leader some superficial abrasion can be OK.)

  Always lubricate a knot before pulling it tight. This helps to ensure that all the turns bed fully down without sticking, so that the finished knot has no internal give, which can cause the knot to fail. Most anglers’ lubricant of choice is saliva, although a few more civilized souls use dilute washing-up liquid. Tighten slowly because pulling fast can cause friction, and heat can damage nylon line, or cause the knot to stick before it is properly locked. For knots in heavy mono or fluoro, use a pair of pliers to tighten the tag end. And when tying heavy line to a swivel, a knot puller can be very useful for pulling the knot fully tight. This is a short length of metal with a small blunt hook at one end and a small T-bar at the other, which is much easier to grip strongly than the swivel itself. Finally, always inspect each knot closely after tying. If it’s not lying right, do it again.

  And with every knot you should practice, practice, practice… until it’s fully lodged in your mind and your muscle memory. When I was an obsessive carp angler I even used to practice tying knots in the dark, so as not to risk scaring the fish with a light when night fishing. I’d thread the hook by holding it against the faint light of the sky. But maybe that’s taking things a bit far.

  RIVER

  13

  My Life as a Fish

  I don’t recall ever being so fixated on the bottom-right corner of my dive computer display. Is that an 8 or a 9? Because if it’s 19 degrees (Celsius) that’s bad. Or it could be. That’s the thing with cold-blooded animals: predicting their behavior is not an exact science. Normally if I get it wrong, it’s academic: better luck next time. But get it wrong with a Nile crocodile, and there might not be a next time.

  I’m in Botswana, in the Okavango River, which famously evaporates before it reaches the sea, ending its course in a swampy delta in the Kalahari desert. We’re here to film tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus), which roam the delta in packs, like silvery two-foot-long piranhas. Nobody has done it before–it’s all about their reptilian neighbors. You just don’t get in the water anywhere near Nile crocodiles. But cameraman Brad Bestelink grew up here, and he discovered a few years ago that it can be done–if you follow very strict protocols. Since the crocs are part of the scenery here, and hence part of our story, we’re trying to film them too.

  It’s the end of what passes for winter in southern Africa. The crocs should still be a bit dozy. But when the water warms up they will become much more active. The switch from one mode to the other happens when water temperature exceeds 18 degrees (64.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Right now, we’re right on that threshold, even though the nights are still surprisingly chilly. There have even been moments when the second digit has flickered up a notch. But it’s not just diving by numbers: even at 18 degrees a croc can be active, if it has had time to crawl out and sunbathe. So it’s wise, in such borderline conditions, to finish diving good and early in the day.

  The thing to avoid at all times is being silhouetted above a crocodile. So our dives start with a ‘negative entry’ (with no air for buoyancy) from our alloy boat, straight down to the bottom in the deepest part of the river, well away from the overgrown banks where the crocs like to lurk. Also, the motor should have scared anything from the put-in point. I am armed with a pointed metal rod about a yard long, but this is mainly to stick in the sandy bottom, to stop the current tumbling me downstream.

  For much of the year the visibility is near zero, and diving is out of the question. It’s an environment where predators see in the dark, with their super-sensitivity to scent and vibration. But at this stage in the annual cycle the water is like weak tea: everything close is clear, but outside a fifteen-foot radius it suddenly gets dark.

  Drifting with the current is a strange experience at first: you find yourself going down a series of steps, but your maximum depth stays the same. It’s like being in one of those drawings by M.C. Escher–until you work out what’s going on. It’s the underwater equivalent of wind-blown sand dunes, with the bottom imperceptibly shallowing before each ridge.

  Ap
proaching a drop-off the other day I saw a shape like a log: brown against lighter brown. Five seconds and I’d be on top of it. As my stick ploughed an audible line in the sand, the shape flexed and kicked away to my left, too quickly for my eyes to fix a clear image. Although fish-like in its movement, it was too big to be even the biggest catfish here, and anything but torpid. It was my first croc.

  Today we’re working along the river’s edge, where the flow is much slacker. It’s a landscape of thick weed mats, deep shadow, and dark tree roots. A couple of times I’ve done a wide-eyed double take, but it’s just been some trick of the light. What I wasn’t expecting was to find it in plain sight–but here it is, still as a statue in a patch of dappled sunlight.

  The crocodile’s body angles up at 45 degrees, pointing towards the water’s edge, with its head just below the surface–perfect for ambushing anything coming to the river for a drink. As per our plan, Brad and I approach from either side, as I try to make sense of my thoughts, to describe the moment. My full-face mask has a microphone hard-wired to a recorder on my back, and I have through-water comms to the surface–but the boat observes strict radio silence because crocs seem to be sensitive to sound from underwater speakers, such as the ones over my ears.

  What to say? Fragments of thoughts tumble through my head: the vibration sensors embedded in its armor; the Australian words of wisdom about the croc you can’t see being the one you’ve got to worry about (but did they ever see one this close?); the crushing power of its jaws, like a truck parking on top of you. Received wisdom says I need facts and figures. But then again–and this is true–sometimes breathless gibberish is the best way to convey the intensity of a moment.

  What is certain, as I gently lift the tip of the crocodile’s tail, is that somewhere in the back of my mind I am pondering, not for the first time, how exactly it was that I ended up doing this kind of thing for a living…

  As an angler I spend a lot of time looking at the contours of riverbanks and the current-lines on the surface of water. From this I try to visualize the underwater topography. And from this I try to work out where the fish will be. For this last step it has become a habit to imagine that I am a fish. Where can I station myself so I won’t burn energy battling the current? Will this also be a good place to intercept passing food? (Chances are it will be.) Where will I feel safe?

  It was my interest in fish that led me to scuba diving, joining the Swindon branch of the British Sub-Aqua Club in 1993. I wanted a deeper insight into what it was like to live and move underwater. But although I had this strong urge to go beneath the surface, I felt ambivalent about it. Rivers and lakes were magical places to me, and part of me didn’t want to demystify them. Something about going beneath the surface and actually seeing what was there seemed almost sacrilegious.

  But my fears were unfounded. It quickly became clear that anyone wanting to dive in fresh water, as opposed to the sea (other than training dives in flooded quarries, when the sea was too rough), was seen as something of a deviant. Nobody wanted to see ‘brown fish in brown water.’ So I joined the diving mainstream, took advantage of the excellent training on offer, and spent time bouncing out to wrecks off the south coast in the club’s rigid-hulled inflatable.

  For many years after that, though, my diving was sporadic. I was channeling most of my spare time and resources into my expeditions to far-flung rivers. It was writing about these trips that would eventually, through a series of twists and turns, lead to me making TV programs about the inhabitants of those rivers. But because our intention was to pull in an audience of more than just anglers, these were not going to be conventional fishing programs. My fishing rod was just a means to an end: my way of revealing the creatures that elude the makers of conventional natural-history programs, because they live in near-zero visibility.

  But if there was any visibility, I wanted if possible to get in the water, and use my angler’s knowledge of fish behavior to show these fish in their natural environment. It was an approach that paid immediate dividends. Our very first episode was about the goonch catfish, in the rivers of the Himalayan foothills. And here this ‘angler underwater’ methodology, using just breath-hold diving gear, brought us the very first underwater footage that anyone had ever obtained of this animal.

  Over the next few years I was a breath-holding man-fish in many varied rivers and lakes: in Thailand (looking for giant snakeheads), Fiji (mottled eels), Japan (giant salamanders), Papua New Guinea (introduced Amazonian pacu), Iceland (Arctic char), Canada (muskie)–and Loch Ness (the obvious). Then the moment came when I no longer had to come up for air. We found ourselves with a bigger budget and the opportunity to use scuba. The first time I scuba-dived on camera was in Brazil, when a twenty-foot anaconda brushed my mask with its tongue.

  This is how I came to find myself underwater in the Okavango… where the crocodile has suddenly moved. Its body has flexed around, affording us a view of its oddly luminous teeth. Then there’s a blur and an empty space where something solid used to be, and the next thing is we’re looking at its tail, disappearing into the gloom. And I realize that, for the crocodile too, these few moments somehow didn’t compute. Just like the anaconda, it probably saw me as some kind of weird fish, but not any kind of fish that it wanted to eat.

  It’s time to call the boat, which should have been keeping our bubbles in sight. We move back to mid-channel, staying vigilant, then Richard our safety diver makes a partial ascent and briefly extends his croc-stick through the surface as a signal. We hear the whine of the motor getting closer, and before we see the boat’s hull we see disembodied faces, peering around the edge of the bright window above us. One by one we rise through the water to merge with the boat’s silhouette, then quickly climb aboard.

  I pull off my mask as gravity reclaims me. I’m human again.

  14

  More Less Is More

  Argentina, Río Paraná. I’m here in search of a huge freshwater stingray known as the short-tailed ray (Potamotrygon brachyura). But the advance information we had about this place isn’t standing up to close scrutiny. The rays are much scarcer than we thought. After three blank days I finally caught one on day four–but at just thirty pounds it hardly qualifies as a monster. We need something much bigger.

  Now it’s day ten, and I’ve caught nothing further. It’s my last day of fishing, and the level of desperation is unprecedented.

  One of the things I keep having to do, when fishing with a film crew, is explain my decisions. Why are you fishing here? Why are you ignoring what that local guy said? Why do you want us all to come back and fish through the night? It can be tiresome but ultimately I welcome it, because it keeps me fishing effectively. These are the questions I should be asking myself–plus a host of others–and I need to have convincing answers.

  And in times of desperation, one question that’s almost guaranteed to arise in everyone’s mind, demanding attention until it has to be vocalized, is: Why don’t you put out more lines?

  It’s just basic arithmetic, isn’t it? Two baits doubles your chances. Three baits even better. And so on. If it’s all a matter of right bait, right place, right time, this allows you to cover so many more bases. In this case, word reached the crew from somebody claiming to know about these rays that I really should be using six or eight rods, from three boats if necessary. That was where I was going wrong. To which I answered (deep breath)… No!

  Where do I begin? It’s largely a matter of focus, and practicalities. If you’re fly-fishing or spinning, it’s obvious that you can’t operate two or three rods simultaneously, unless you’re a Hindu deity with multiple arms. When you’re bait fishing it seems equally obvious that you can use more than one rod–but I would argue that, in most cases, you shouldn’t.

  For most of my bait fishing I use a single rod. This is partly a legacy of my years of solo traveling, when a vital concern was mobility, and the amount of fishing gear at my disposal was limited to what I could carry on my back, onto trucks,
boats and buses, along with a few spare clothes. So it was pretty minimalist. But during that time I learned that this isn’t necessarily a handicap. Now I’ll fish a single rod by choice, even when I can slip more gear into the pile of film equipment without anybody noticing. This is because, in many situations, one rod is more effective than two.

  For a lot of my fishing, I like to hold the rod, even if I might be in for a long wait before anything happens. This helps me focus on how I am presenting the bait. Presentation is another vital part of the fishing equation. Even if you have the right bait in the right place at the right time, you could be heading for failure if your presentation is wrong.

  When fishing a deadbait on a rocky riverbed, from time to time I gently lift and drop the rod-tip. I do this to see if I can feel the lead scraping or bumping on the bottom. If I can’t feel direct contact with the lead, it could mean the current has wrapped the line around a rock. If a fish investigates the bait now, the bait might not move freely. In some cases this might not matter: the fish will take it anyway. But more likely it will reject the bait–and I will have had no indication that anything has happened. If the fish still decides to take, but the line is snagged, then my chances of landing it are minimal. Hence my concern that my presentation is ‘clean.’ And if I have serious doubts about this, the remedy is to recast.

  In North India in 2005 I desperately needed to catch a goonch catfish for my Jungle Hooks India series. I’d previously hooked a very big one but lost it when my 90lb nylon cut on a rock, and after that the pool had gone completely dead. I fished for hours and hours, day and night, at other pools too, without a touch, until our time ran out and we had to go home. Three months later we were back, having sat out the monsoon in the UK. On day one (take two) I cast out again, into a place that had become synonymous with demoralization. I wanted to get the bait close to the rock wall that runs along one side of the pool, without the current sweeping it away, and my cast settled perfectly. Then, as previously, nothing happened. And as time passed, a feeling grew that nothing was going to happen. Although I was reluctant to dislodge the bait from a good and difficult-to-achieve position, I finally gave a gentle pull–and felt nothing other than an increase in tension. A stronger pull: still nothing. Snagged. After managing to work the tackle free, I checked the line for damage and recast. This time a gentle pull brought the distinct feel of lead bumping on rock. Perfect. And with that invisible change in presentation came a profound shift in everything: from mere going through the motions to a state of possibility.