by Jeremy Wade
This time I had rehearsed mentally. I could see from the movement of the line that the fish was moving away from the bank, so no worry for now about snagging. I engaged the reel and waited for the line to tighten, and when it did I pulled back. Immediately it was clear, from the answering resistance, that this was a heavy fish, but from the boat I was in a good position to get control–a pull from directly above is hard for most fish to resist for long. Even so, it was a while before I saw the fish, dark against dark with a hint of a stripe. Not long after that, it was on the surface and ready for landing. One option was to make our way to the inside of the bend and beach it on the gently shelving sand, or I could use a gloved hand to grab its lower jaw, as one does for wels. But both of these entailed some delay and uncertainty (I hadn’t yet seen how secure the hook hold was) and for this reason I had put a landing net ready in the boat, which my guide Roslan now lowered into the water. A few moments later he raised the net and we had it.
It weighed fifty-two pounds, and we had a program. An alignment of bait, place and time successfully achieved, which wouldn’t have been achieved, possibly, if I’d stayed with my original plan. Which isn’t to say that planning is not necessary. On the contrary it’s vital–it’s just that things will never be exactly as predicted. So although it’s hard to know for sure, I put this catch down to being opportunistic. I saw a feeding fish and I reacted. The fish was telling me where to cast, and I listened.
19
Don’t Think
I arrived at the lake in the afternoon, and was pleased to find that nobody else was there. I had plenty of time to set up before fishing the night. The question was, where?
There were only a few accessible spots, in gaps between the trees, and the favorite was where one of the banks bulged inward to form a point. From here it was possible to cover a variety of options: towards trailing tree branches on the left, off a big lily pad to the right, and into deep open water straight ahead. This well-trodden place was the obvious default, but it didn’t really appeal, partly because of its popularity. I looked at the water and started to walk quietly around it.
Although I was alert to signs of fish–a fizz of bubbles, twitching weeds, a rocking of the surface–I saw none. But it was not wasted time. I had what I wanted.
Over the years I’ve become aware of something that I can best describe as an internal divining rod: something that, for no apparent reason, shifts my attention in a particular direction. When I look at the water I sometimes just have a feeling about a certain place. If asked to explain what factors might be responsible–wind direction? light?–I normally couldn’t do so. On this occasion I found myself drawn to one of the lake’s corners, around to the right of the point.
The water here was overhung by low branches. To reach it I had to take a small gap in some scrubby vegetation and descend several feet, to a narrow, sloping strip of spongy black soil, too small to put up my bed-chair and homemade brolly camp (in those days just a large umbrella with canvas sides stitched to it). The branches would make an overhead cast impossible, but distance wouldn’t be necessary because there were only a few yards of open water before an expansive lily bed. It was no place to set up for the night, but my mind was made up.
Although this was before the days of rod pods, it was normal when static carp fishing to put out two rods, or sometimes three. Because of the confined space, I decided to stick to one. And no buzzer, because the bait would be mere feet from the rod-tip–just a small cylinder of crinkled aluminum foil hanging on the line.
When darkness fell, it was absolute. In the open there’s surprisingly good visibility most nights, but under foliage it can drop to zero, or very close. Although many hours stretched ahead, I don’t remember being uncomfortable or tired, because of my feeling that something was going to happen. I was confident that I was in the right place.
It was the rustle that first alerted me. A tiny sound, but one I’d become conditioned to react to. I turned my head and saw a ghostly patch of luminescence, where some of the stray photons that had made it through the trees were being reflected in my direction by my bite indicator. It was moving: slowly up, then abruptly down as a coil of line slipped off the open spool. My hand felt its way to the rod handle as I closed the bail arm and waited for the line to tighten. Out of nowhere came a weight.
In the darkness there were no dimensions, no layers. I couldn’t see the rod against the sky, so I had to gauge where the fish was by feel–and by sound, when it sent up boils to the surface. I dropped the rod to one side then the other as it surged back and forth in the confined space, trying to keep it more confused than I was.
After an unmeasured time that was probably three or four minutes, I felt that it was tiring, and unlikely now to make it to the weed bed, as long as I kept a cool head. Then came a moment when I sensed a change: it was near the surface and its motive force was no longer convincing. With my left hand I reached for the landing net and slid it into the water, its forty-two-inch oak arms extending in a V-shape on the end of a six-foot handle. Now I raised the rod, directly above the net handle, to bring the fish towards the net’s apex. Somewhere in my head I converted feeling and sound into a picture of shapes in the darkness, and judged the moment to be right. I lifted the net frame clear of the water, put down the rod, and got two hands on the job of securing the fish.
This was when things became confused, and didn’t go to plan. The line seemed to be disappearing into the net, so the fish was in there, but the meshes were caught on a sunken tree root. When I pulled, nothing happened. If I pulled harder, I risked ripping the net and losing the fish.
While groping mentally for ways out of this impasse, I registered that more of the net was out of the water. Perhaps the root was bending, or about to break. I pulled a little harder, and the net came towards me. A bit harder, and it came some more. It was sliding up the mud towards the bank.
That’s when I realized there was no root. What I felt was the fish, emerging from its weightless world, transitioning from zero to twenty-six and a half pounds.
Some anglers claim a mystical connection with fish, an inexplicable knowledge of where they are lurking. And sometimes it does feel like that, as it did that night at the lake. Despite my scientific background, I find myself listening out for an inner voice, a voice that sometimes insists on making itself heard, to pass on knowledge that comes from no discernible source. But I think there is a rational explanation, at least most of the time.
What I think is happening is this. We spend our waking hours constantly looking and observing, in a semi-automatic way. Who’s that coming towards me? What time is it? Which way is that car going to turn? But there’s also a lot of peripheral information that we take in below the level of consciousness. This information comes from all our senses, and may include such things as the smell of the air and changes in atmospheric pressure (felt in the middle ear, as changing tension in the eardrum). Most of the time this is just routine monitoring; it goes into a short-term mental cache, from where, normally, it is destined to evaporate.
In parallel with this collection of data, we are also analytical, reasoning animals. We see something that looks out of the ordinary and we ask why. We also maintain a mental model of the world, on which we run simulations: If I do x, what are the chances that this will lead to z, as opposed to y? All this is frighteningly complex, if we think about it too much, beyond the inner workings of any computer. It’s software that has been shaped, just as surely as our bodies, by the unforgiving forces of natural selection. Testament to its effectiveness is the mere fact of our survival as a species, on a planet shared with other animals that are bigger, stronger, faster, better swimmers, better fliers etc. Many of these were intent on eating our ancestors, and the rest were highly motivated to avoid our ancestors eating them. If we think in terms solely of physical characteristics, humans survived against the odds, by undeserved fluke. But if we look beyond the physical, we survived–and dominated–by virtue of our onboard c
omputers.
And the thing about all this data crunching and analysis is that much of it goes on below the level of consciousness. It’s a back room that we never see inside. But sometimes a piece of paper is passed out of the door, or an answerphone message is left. Pick your own metaphor.
Sometimes the unconscious gives us answers in a dream, or a daydream. A famous example is the eureka moment experienced by the nineteenth-century German chemist August Kekulé, when he intuited the structure of benzene. The formula of this chemical compound had long been known to be C6H6 (meaning each molecule contains six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms) but the shape of the molecule was a puzzle. In school chemistry labs, such as the one where I briefly taught, complex molecules are often represented by 3D models of colored balls (atoms) held together by a network of struts (chemical bonds). Alternatively they can be shown as 2D diagrams. In a diagram a carbon atom is represented by the letter C, surrounded by four radiating lines, symbolizing four potential chemical bonds; and a hydrogen atom is the letter H, possessing just a single line. The challenge is to put six of one and half a dozen of the other together in such a way that all those sticking-out lines connect to another line, with none left over. To attempt this you don’t even need to know any chemistry–it’s the kind of logic puzzle you might find in the back of a newspaper. But until Kekulé cracked it, the solution had eluded the experts.
The answer, once you’ve seen it, is blindingly obvious. The six carbon atoms form a hexagonal ring, with alternating single and double bonds between them. That uses up three of each carbon atom’s four bonds, which leaves one bond remaining to link with one of the hydrogen atoms. For Kekulé, the ring structure came to him as a vision: of a snake eating its own tail.
But the workings of the mental machinery that delivers the dream, or the insight, remain unknown. We tend to visualize the space inside our heads as being made up of compartments: like rooms full of filing cabinets and display screens, linked by corridors and electrical circuitry–which doesn’t quite fit with our other picture of it, as a couple of pounds of congealed porridge. Within this soft mass, neurologists have a partial idea of what happens where, but the relationship between structure and function is much more obscure than in a leg or a heart. So there is no clearly delineated box within a box where ‘the unconscious’ resides, although it can help our understanding to think of it that way, in the same way that it helps us to understand chemical compounds by seeing them as assemblages of ping pong balls and struts. But even though we don’t know exactly where or how it happens, a lot of problems are chewed over in our heads without our being aware of it. The solutions float into our consciousness, as if from nowhere, sometimes as a coded message–a snake swallowing its tail–and sometimes as something more urgent.
At times the message is a matter of life and death. Stuck in my mind is a dramatic story I heard (I think on the radio) many years ago, and although I’ve forgotten the specifics of who, when and where, the what of this story is a dramatic illustration of how our minds can work. A racing driver was talking about a premonition that had possibly saved his life. He’d been speeding towards a bend when suddenly he felt–somehow knew for certain–that something was wrong. Against the all-powerful imperative to go as fast as possible, he eased up on the throttle, and coming out of the bend saw the chaos of an accident up ahead, which had been invisible to him before–and which he would have ploughed into had he still been traveling at racing speed.
Only later, using the racer’s ability to decompress time, both in the micro-moment and retrospectively, did he work out the mechanics of that premonition. He’d passed that place several times before, but on this lap the pattern falling on his retina was abnormal. A band of color in the distance was dark instead of light. Not faces but backs of heads. Not looking his way, but at something up the track. So not premonition at all, but observation and reasoning, happening almost at the speed of reflex–and not involving the conscious mind at all until the very last nanosecond, when the motor neurons to the right foot fired their urgent command. Or maybe even this message took a shortcut…
All of which has no relevance to angling. Except it does. While few would challenge that anglers may be dreamers, any similarity with motor racing is less obvious, even though angling is sometimes described as a sport. One thing that is regularly trotted out, however, is that angling awakens the hunting instinct, but rarely does anyone consider what that means. Hunting is about acquiring protein and precious calories in the conveniently packaged form of the bodies of other animals. But those animals are understandably reluctant to hand those nutrients over, so hunting can be dangerous for the hunter. Venturing into the wild also makes the hunter vulnerable to other predators. One bad slip and you’re done for. So it’s a serious pursuit, and the angler who has a sense of this, I believe, who takes time to blend into the landscape and who goes into hunting mode, is more open to any signals that might arrive, from those deep and mysterious parts of our brains that are otherwise under-used in our modern lives.
Or the explanation of my catch was more mundane than this. The place I chose was not fished by anyone else, certainly not at night, because it was uncomfortable to sit there for any length of time. This, on a hard-pressured fishery, would make it a comfortable place for fish, where they would feel safe. But this reasoning came after my decision, a case of slow thought catching up with fast, unconscious thought.
Two nights later I walked around the lake again. This time the inner divining rod drew me to a place on the opposite bank, where a nearly dried-up stream bed created a damp gravelly strip at the water’s edge. I could have reached the water here from the popular spot on the point, by belting out a long cast, but I enjoy the intimacy of close range so I decided to fish short instead, right in the shallows. As before, there was no space to set up as such, so I sat on the bank next to a single rod, oblivious to the discomfort because discomfort reminds us, sometimes, that this is real hunting. It’s a special kind of empty time, in which every moment is full of possibility.
And again, during the night, the silver paper moved. Once more, after a tense struggle close in, the net slid into the water. Once more the meshes parted to reveal a large carp.
I recognized it by the scale pattern, just a token scattering on its dark, leathery skin. It was the same fish.
20
D. E. T. A. I. L. S.
In the Kumaon foothills of the Indian Himalayas there is an ancient, long-lost tradition of buffalo wrestling. Actually there isn’t, but it’s possible that some future anthropologist will discover an echo of this strange custom in the region’s oral history.
I’d been hearing stories about people disappearing in the nearby Kali River, and when I trekked into the valley a farmer told me he’d seen his prize buffalo dragged into the water while it was drinking. He never saw it again. The Kali is a powerful river, with whirlpools that appear from nowhere, and in places just one step can take you from three feet to thirty feet of water. The skeptical part of me said these disappearances were probably drownings. But I couldn’t completely rule out the possibility that something pulled them in. Normally buffaloes wallow in water, but I never saw that on the Kali. And I never saw people bathing. They also had a plausible culprit: a giant, hideous catfish known as the goonch. I’d seen a photograph of a goonch seven and a half feet long, which would have weighed some 300 pounds. Such a beast, if it grabbed a pale foot waving in muddy water, thinking it was a snack-sized fish, would have no trouble pulling the foot’s owner under. In fact a swimmer could easily be pulled down by fish much smaller. A person in the water has very little buoyancy; even a fifty-pound fish could overcome that. Think back to school days and how easy it is to be ducked in a swimming pool. But a full-grown buffalo is a piece of living agricultural machinery, what they use in these parts as a tractor, for ploughing the terraced fields. Standing in the shallows, it would take a very big fish indeed to shift it.
If credibility has not by now been stretched
beyond breaking point, this leads to an obvious question: How big could a goonch grow? And the answer is, nobody knows. Fish are very different from land animals in terms of maximum size. Because their bodies are supported by water, they can keep on growing, if their genes allow it and if they have a good food supply. Once upon a time a twenty-pound carp was the fish of a lifetime, then Richard Walker caught his forty-four-pounder from Redmire Pool. Now, thanks in large part to anglers feeding the water, we’ve seen a further doubling, and more, of what is considered possible. In France and Hungary, carp have now been caught over a hundred pounds. It’s what’s known as indeterminate growth, and it’s happening in front of our eyes.
But the Kali is no longer a rich fishery. The populations of smaller fish that goonch could feed on have declined over the last century. This would seem to rule out any giant-sized predator. But, say the locals, there is another food source that could keep the mythical giant well fed. This comes in the form of half-burnt human corpses from riverside cremations. The Kali is a tributary of the sacred Ganges, and it is Hindu custom to consign their dead to the river. And just in case I was wondering, which I was, they said there are no crocodiles here. The altitude is too high and the water’s too cold.
The question I was asking myself at this point was the one I ask everywhere. What is the very biggest fish that I might hook? This wasn’t just idle curiosity, but central to the decision of what tackle to use. Getting an answer is not an exact science. There is a lot of uncertainty and wild speculation about how big fish can grow. For a long time supposedly reliable sources said arapaima grow to fifteen feet long, which would equate to a weight of around 2,000 pounds. A more realistic estimate would be eleven feet and 500 pounds. When it comes to hard facts, rather than speculation, the biggest freshwater fish that has been fully authenticated was a nine-foot, 646-pound, algae-eating Mekong giant catfish, netted in Thailand in 2005. For goonch, which live in colder water and would therefore grow more slowly, I hazarded a top-weight guess of maybe 400 pounds. But size isn’t everything. Some big fish can be brought in on quite light tackle, if the environment is user-friendly. The goonch is not one of those fish. They are negatively buoyant and have huge wing-like pectoral fins, which they use to stick themselves to the bottom. They are somewhat like a stingray on the line and getting them in is mostly a matter of brute force. So heavy gear, but how heavy?