by Jeremy Wade
The important thing, therefore, is to make any wraps going down the leader, so at any moment you can open your hand and allow the line to spill off–‘dumping the line’ in the parlance of the deck hands who (wearing gloves) bring in sharks and 1,000-pound marlin this way. It’s another of those crucial things that you need to think about and plan before fishing, so it happens automatically, rather than taking up valuable head space when there are other things to think about and react to. But more than that, it’s something that needs to be rehearsed. Your arm needs to know what it feels like to make the correct move, and your hand needs to know how it feels to take the line in the correct way. It sounds paradoxical, but you need muscle memory already in place before you do this on a fish for the first time. But this is possible. You can tie a few feet of line to a bag and work with that. Then, taking a tip from dancers and gymnasts, athletes and musicians, surgeons and martial artists, you can keep it fresh by visualizing the procedure in your mind. You can also mime the movements, which looks like a cross between a t’ai chi routine and a game of charades. Ultimately, the more familiar you are with what you have to do, the less likely you are to fumble when the time comes.
Lining a tarpon from a float tube is an extreme case of a drill that has to be followed correctly. But there are simpler, more everyday things that benefit from actual and/or mental rehearsal, like finding your reel drag in a hurry, maybe in the dark. Or operating a landing net when fishing solo.
With most fish you’ll grab the leader once and that will be it. But on this day things weren’t that simple. On the first attempt, the tarpon kicked and started towing me and I had to dump the line. The stamina of this fish was unbelievable, but this escalation was making it tire. Even so, I had to make a few more grabs before, finally, I didn’t have to let go. The tarpon was on the surface beside me and I could see the fly, hooked in the edge of its mouth. To get to this point had taken two hours.
Lightly holding the now-still fish I removed the fly, then prepared to show my catch to the camera by pulling its front end briefly out of the water. I went to grip its jaw by putting both thumbs in its mouth, which works well if you’re in an armchair-type float tube, where you can get the fish in front of you. But it felt awkward: I was having to twist to my left and work over the top of an inflated tube. This, combined with the way the fish was now lying, with its body hanging down in the water, meant that I should have tried for a different grip, with my fingers gripping the inside of the lower jaw and my thumbs outside. But that’s me talking with hindsight. At the time I tried to press ahead with Plan A, despite it feeling wrong. And while I was doing this, the fish gave one final kick, twisted out of my grip, and was gone.
The expression on the director’s face was the biggest grin you could imagine. From the perspective of a dramatist, the unfakeable emotion that follows such an epic loss is pure TV gold. It also sets up the final success as being so much more significant–if there is final success. From an angler’s point of view, though, losing a fish through human error is unacceptable. The only thing that redeems it is the learning of a lesson, to make sure the error never happens again.
With this fish I did everything right until the very last moment. Then, partly through fatigue, I lost concentration. And that’s all it takes.
Some kind souls have pointed out that, in certain circles, touching the leader counts as a capture. But I wanted to get a clear look at the fish, and in that I failed. In need of solace, though, I also remembered what went right. The stamina of that fish was, and still is, hard to believe. But despite the handicap of my heavy craft, I managed, eventually, to outmaneuver it and start wearing it down. Then there was the precarious procedure of manipulating the rod and taking hold of the leader, which each time happened without disaster. If I’d not planned and rehearsed, I wouldn’t have got this fish as close as I did; and in light of this I found myself feeling confident for the next encounter–if there was one. But I was not going to fish anymore that day. To come back physically sharp and clear headed, I needed some recovery time…
Sometimes, as it was with these tarpon, it really is like training for a fight. Your opponent has strengths and weaknesses, and to counter their moves you need moves of your own. But it’s not enough just to plan them; you need to be able to execute them, flawlessly and without hesitation. Any lack of preparedness will be punished, and the outcome won’t be in your favor. The fact that the fish takes your bait will be an irrelevance, because being unprepared turns the right time into the wrong time. In short, treating an opportunity to catch a big fish as if it were a rehearsal is asking for failure. Don’t even put the bait in the water unless you’re confident of getting the fish in.
The next day I was back on the water, on a large, mirror-like lagoon, inching a shrimp imitation through what appeared to be a tarpon corridor. Eventually, after a series of methodical casts, some better executed than others, fly and tarpon coincided, signaled by a metallic flick on the line. This time all my reflexes were more flowing and confident, and after bringing the fish in, I secured it properly, then released it.
I finished my time on the Mosquito Coast with two big tarpon–one of them a good 150 pounds–and a renewed appreciation of the importance of rehearsal.
16
Mumbo-Jumbo
In advertising, so the famous saying goes, half the money you spend is wasted. But you never know which half. In angling too, sometimes it’s impossible to say what was significant and what was not…
Many years ago, having decided it might be time to blend in more with my peers, I made a visit to London’s Oxford Street. I quickly found what I was looking for: a shop devoted entirely to clothes made from denim. Behind the counter, clad in the products of his emporium, lounged a man with long golden curly hair. He was surrounded by a group of young women, in postures of casual adoration and similar attire, who may have been customers or staff, but who, either way, weren’t more than momentarily interested in my non-denim-clad presence. Overwhelmed by such a cornucopia of clothing, I started to flick through the nearest rack, pretending to appraise the material and stitch quality, but in fact afflicted by an attack of retail paralysis. Given time, though, I was confident that I would find something I liked.
At least I was, until the manager spoke. ‘Those are for chicks, man.’
Recalling them now, I laugh at his drawled words, but at the time they brought a hot glow to my face, as I slunk from the shop without even trying on a waistcoat.
Some years later, in 1986, I was just days away from traveling to India, to fish for mahseer, but I hadn’t found anything close to the rod I needed. In quantitative terms I wanted something about ten feet long, with a good through-action, and a test curve of about four pounds, twice the backbone of my most muscular carp rod, but there was no off-the-peg solution. In desperation I reckoned I could get an eleven-foot pike rod, chop six inches off the tip and butt, and that would be more or less what I wanted. So I went into one of my local tackle shops, in search of a suitable subject for butchery.
It was a similar configuration: man behind counter, surrounded by lounging mates. When I described what I was looking for and why, I was, quite literally, laughed out of the shop. My mention of a four-pound test curve brought popping eyes and spluttered exclamations: ‘Never heard of it!’
Luckily I was saved by a more understanding fellow, a well-known fishing-tackle magnate from the Midlands, who had just what I wanted–almost. It was an eleven-foot surfcasting rod, built from two equal-length pieces of brown hollow fiberglass, and designed for bass. When I got it home I took off the rings and respaced them (adding one more) so that when I matched it with my chosen reel (an Abu Ambassadeur 7000 multiplier) and clamped the butt horizontally in a vise, I could hang a four-pound weight on the line without it touching the rod between the guides at any point. Then I hacksawed six inches off the butt and it was ready to go.
When I brought it home from India, nearly six months later, there were grooves burnt by ru
nning line in the plastic grip above the reel mount, but otherwise it was intact. More than that, it had brought in mahseer to ninety-two pounds. At the time, I couldn’t imagine a tougher test for a rod. So when I went to the Congo four years later, after goliath tigerfish, I took it with me–despite it being a bit on the long side for boat fishing (even after taking a bit more off the butt) and despite having the loan of something more high-tech and purpose-built. That two-month trip was a blank, but on the rematch the next year, when the chosen tributary wasn’t in flood, the same rod brought my first goliath, a fish of 38½ pounds–a creature that most people hadn’t even heard of at the time.
At this point this plain-looking tool became, unofficially, my lucky rod. This was partly to do with its mechanical capabilities, but it was more than that. Sometimes an object becomes imbued with significance, a strange power. When you take it in your hands it completes a circuit. An identical replacement wouldn’t be the same. It has something, which, like a soul, can’t be weighed. Because you’ve come through testing moments together, it becomes part of you. Or so it feels. And so I took it to the Amazon, when I went looking for arapaima, a fish that potentially dwarfs the other creatures it had handled.
By this time, technically better options were available. Carbon fiber (graphite) was becoming more affordable and quickly replacing hollow fiberglass, so my mahseer rod was now something of an old-fashioned relic. But although slightly heavier than carbon, glass was tried and tested, and known to be robust. And for the kind of fishing I was doing the difference in weight was academic. The main problem was safely transporting it. With its unequal two-piece configuration, where the more delicate tip was the longer piece, it was not ideal. But with careful packing in a piece of drainpipe the right size, this difficulty was overcome.
To cut a very long story short, this rod, having already brought me mahseer and goliath tigerfish, went on to catch several arapaima. In doing so it became the only rod in existence to have caught these three iconic freshwater species, reason enough to consider it something special. A few years later I retired it, which felt like giving an old friend a well-earned rest. In the end, this wasn’t too hard a decision. For a start it was time to scale up a bit. And by now there were some off-the-peg rods that better suited my needs.
For the most part though I was still improvising, making creative (read ‘incorrect’) use of saltwater gear. For example, when I returned to India to target goonch catfish I used nine-foot uptide rods, which worked really well, apart from not being designed to travel, thanks to having two very unequal sections. I also started to acquire some rods that were purpose-built; a couple I built myself, and I’ve been given a few too. Over time, thanks to the lucky situation I find myself in, I’ve also accumulated quite a collection of specialist tools: a popping rod for giant trevally, heavy fly rods, a rod for shore-based shark fishing…
In some respects it’s now a far cry from the solo fishing that I used to do, but I still have a few heavy bait-fishing rods that I use for maybe half of my fishing. A couple of these are designed for big wels catfish and there’s an even heavier rod that I had built to my specs. None of these, though, has achieved the same significance as that mahseer rod. Perhaps that’s because my fishing back then used to be more self-reliant. During a two- or three-month trip, most of the time would be consumed by traveling–by riverboat, truck or bus–or waiting for transport that hardly ever came. On one Amazon riverboat we were packed so tight that I could have reached out from my hammock and touched thirteen other passengers. It’s not often you can say that about your sleeping quarters. Two or three nights into this voyage I was woken by an impact and a lurch. People were screaming and running to the rails. The chain to the tiller had broken and we’d rammed the bank. Luckily we didn’t tip and sink. On another occasion, though, I was asleep on a boat which did sink, and got out with just seconds to spare.
On these earlier trips I was in a different head space, often exhausted, sleep-deprived and frustrated, and having to deal with all this on my own. In such circumstances, when your world is reduced to what you can carry, you become very attached to those few objects. And in this context, a fiberglass fishing rod stands out as something rather preposterous, because despite having its special hidden strength it is a thing of great fragility. It needs looking after and protecting. There’s an investment of care that seems out of place towards something inanimate.
But here’s something strange that this inanimate object did. When beset by the feeling that I often have, that capturing a particular fish is near-impossible, it was a tangible reminder that I’d prevailed in such circumstances before. It bestowed a degree of confidence, which is always a valuable commodity when fishing, because it boosts attention. So my reference to my old mahseer rod as my lucky rod is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. There is some basis to looking at it this way, which does stand up to scrutiny.
But a rod is a functional part of the machinery that catches a fish. What’s the deal with something like a lucky hat or a lucky ritual, such as making a cup of tea from lake water on arrival? Fishermen have always been well known for their superstitions, especially when fishing at sea. Whistling on a boat is said to be unlucky, because it summons high winds and rough weather, but I’ve never heard a skipper admonish anyone on this matter. But I have come across a number of skippers who won’t allow bananas on their boat, because they believe it brings bad luck. Very few can tell you where this belief came from. Maybe it’s because in the old days a cargo of bananas might harbor stowaways in the form of venomous creepy-crawlies or snakes. More likely it’s because bananas hasten the ripening of other fruit, so on a long voyage they could cause citrus fruits such as limes to go ‘off,’ and hence make passengers and crew vulnerable to scurvy. It seems to be in that category of beliefs that used to have a good reason behind it, but it hardly applies on a day out in a motor launch. Even so, if somebody in the film crew has inadvertently packed bananas with our lunch, I’m right there with the boat crew if they request we leave them ashore. I believe that our observance or non-observance might affect our prospects, because it changes the atmosphere and expectations.
This opens out into a wider consideration of respecting beliefs. A lot of my catches are down to collaboration with local fishermen, and in some places my visit has included a visit to a shaman or witch doctor. Inevitably somebody will watch this and be moved to tick me off for giving airtime to what they see as heathen mumbo-jumbo. My reaction, when this happens, is unapologetic. OK, part of the reason is to add a bit of color, but it’s not gratuitous. If my local collaborator believes that my being blessed or protected or whatever increases our chances, then that makes it worth doing, for the same reason that I don’t take bananas on boats if asked not to. But it goes beyond that.
It’s also being respectful to beliefs that deserve respect. While some beliefs that some people hold deserve to be challenged, a lot of so-called primitive beliefs don’t fall into that category, and here’s why. Most rituals to ensure a fisherman’s safety or good fortune entail making some kind of offering to the water, or to the water’s guardian spirits. In Mongolia I visited a shaman who was, unusually, a young woman. Robed in long strips of bright-colored cloth and an elaborate blindfold, she whirled like a dervish and beat a drum of animal hide, and when she next spoke her voice had transformed to a harsh old-man’s croak. She told me that before I fished I should make an offering to the river spirit, who was the guardian of the fish. Specifically, I should take a bowl of yak’s milk and flick some of it towards the river and some on the riverbank.
From a scientific viewpoint, there is no mechanism whereby this can influence the outcome of a day’s fishing. Or is there? It’s interesting that the idea of making a symbolic offering to the water is widespread across so many different cultures. Often tied in with this is the belief that you shouldn’t take more than you need, and that if you do you are liable to be punished. In the tidal swamps of the Sundarbans, at the mouth of the Ganges, the godde
ss Banbibi will protect you from man-eating tigers–but only if you just take what you need, and no more. On the Zambezi the Nyami-nyami spirit protects fishermen, but is vengeful if the river is harmed. In the Amazon the mãe d’água, the mother of the water, is likewise not to be provoked by over-exploitation. Such views are of course characterized as primitive, but a moment’s thought will reveal a simple wisdom that our supposedly more developed culture has forgotten. Therefore, when I remember, I do what the Mongolian shaman told me. I don’t have the yak’s milk anymore, but I try to take a moment to reflect on our relationship with the water and with the fish. They are a gift, whose presence is not to be taken for granted, and our fishing should be a respectful act. This won’t necessarily help us catch more fish today–but it does have the potential to help others catch fish in the future. And it makes those we catch today more significant and more deserved.
Meanwhile if you want to wear your lucky hat, even if it’s from that denim shop on Oxford Street, you will hear no mockery from me.
DELTA
17
Resist the Flow
At a certain popular lake in south-east England, the far bank was a no-fishing zone, so the standard method was to belt out baits towards the opposite margin, some eighty yards away. The lake didn’t produce a lot of fish, but the thinking behind this approach was vindicated by the fact that most captures came from this area.