How to Think Like a Fish

by Jeremy Wade

  To keep a hold on these details, we need an external device to back up our onboard memory, something we can plug in when required. Personally I’m a fan of fused cellulose-fiber mat technology, otherwise known as a notebook, of the non-electronic kind.

  But writing a blow-by-blow account of each day’s fishing would take forever, so it’s necessary to apply a filter if you don’t want to succumb to information overload. I’ve been keeping fishing diaries since my mid-teens, which gradually morphed into fishing/travel notebooks. They started off brief and succinct, in tiny, neat handwriting, with occasional mini-essays when I caught something. Then they became a mix of methodical and rambling, complete with maps, diagrams, shopping lists, squashed bedbugs (entombed in black insulating tape), fish scales, bits of line, the bloodied thorn that stapled my heel inside my shoe on an Indian hillside, and the hook (comically small by my current standards) that brought in a ninety-two-pound mahseer. More recently, though, they have lapsed back into brevity, with gaping gaps, the result of crammed schedules and sleep deprivation. A lot of what’s written is also illegible, which I used to think was just me, until I discovered that the four rules for political diaries–the ‘Four Is’–as codified by Gyles Brandreth and Alan Clark, are: immediate, indiscreet, intimate and indecipherable. I too was writing personal thoughts that I didn’t want anyone else to read, at least not until I was ready. What many of those thoughts were is anybody’s guess, because I still can’t decipher them. But secrecy was a wise precaution. One day my uncle saw (over my shoulder) one of my carp bait formulations, and commented on the inclusion of ‘ingredient X.’ My uncle didn’t fish, but he might have met somebody in a pub who did. As it is, the identity of ingredient X remains a secret to this day. And no, I’m not going to reveal it now, because I don’t think other carp anglers ever got onto it. It might have some mileage one day.

  What all of this boils down to is: I’m still trying to get it right. But having run the whole gamut–from obsessively detailed through brief and semi-legible to nothing–I think I’m now in a good position to give some good advice, to others and to myself.

  The first thing is to have some consideration for your future self, the self who might be poring over these pages in weeks or months or years to come, searching for some vital scrap of information. To find something in a landscape you need landmarks, and when the landscape is 192 pages of words in a notebook the best landmarks are dates. My most easy-to-navigate notebooks have the dates in capitals (FRI 25TH APR) and enclosed in a box, to make them stand out from the surrounding scrawl. Also ‘boxed’ are places (MOVED TO HAIRA), significant captures, and other notable events (Elephants–everywhere! [no fishing]). These are from an A5 hard-bound book, identified by a label on its battered cover as INDIA 86. As well as being signposts, these also provide the basic when/where/what information that forms the framework for recording any story. (Just add who, why and how and you have the ‘Five Ws’ checklist used by journalists and police investigators.)

  Other than making this information stand out, it can be pretty free-form, in as much or as little detail as seems appropriate, but I’ll normally start with a note about tackle. It’s rather like writing up a scientific experiment (‘equipment,’ ‘method’…), which makes sense because, actually, that’s what it is. With every cast we’re testing a hypothesis: If I cast this bait there, there’s a better than random chance that a fish will take it. This is where I’ll often draw a quick labeled diagram of the terminal tackle, to show leader material and length, hook size, weight–every component. There’s another 1,000 words to be saved by sketching a rough plan of my fishing spot, showing current, approximate depths, features and snags, my position and the places where I cast.

  Then there’s bait. On the night of 7 September 1972, at an Essex sand pit, I set up next to some sunken tree trunks, car doors etc. and cast out a crust-balanced ‘special’ bait concocted from: “Oxo”, “Pal”, 3-day-old cat food, sardine and tomato paste, cheese, flour, bread, toast, mouldy bread and dog biscuits. Sometime after midnight this tempted a smoky-grey mirror carp of 12lb 2oz. Nowadays I’m more likely to rig deadbaits, sometimes in strange and unorthodox ways, determined by whatever bait I happened to get hold of and the oral anatomy of the fish I’m after.

  Recording these things helps to make me question why I am employing this method. Because it worked in the past? Or–much more interesting–am I trying something new? If so, based on what thinking exactly?

  Usually I’ll make these notes after I’ve brought in my line, by the light of a campfire or a headlamp. But I still like to have my notebook with me on the bank, to jot key things as they happen: fish size, time of capture, weather changes. Maybe water temperature, barometric pressure and moon phase too. Water level can also be crucial: in parts of the Amazon the seasonal rise and fall can be as much as fifty feet–but a fall of just one foot can be the signal to hurry to a specific lake. Then there’s visibility, which can dramatically affect the willingness of some fish to feed. So I look and note. For this reason I now favor the more portable A6 size, hard-bound and with pen holder attached.

  Looking back is the time to fill the gaps. I jot a brief summary of what happened in an abbreviated style, not worrying too much about grammar, just getting it down. Often this is not sequential; it jumps back and forward, as things jump into my mind. Such as the submarine driving past, as I sat with my lines reaching down to the bottom of the fjord.

  Now is also the time to come to some kind of conclusion. Did the original hypothesis prove correct? No fish doesn’t necessarily mean no. It may be a case, simply, of persisting–of waiting for the right time. Or a new idea comes to mind. Either way, a few minutes going back over the day makes me interrogate my fishing more. In order to arrange words I must arrange thoughts. Like drawing, it also makes me observe more closely, and try to understand what I see. It’s an antidote to fishing on autopilot. And this, even if I never refer to them again, makes my note-making worth doing.

  But I do go back to them, not just to confirm odd facts when I’m planning to return to the water, but to savor those times again:

  Felt v. small fish but suddenly went solid made powerful surge to left–line got caught around tree–went in after it (up to neck) freed line and subsequently landed fish after about 6-7(?) mins total. (Oxfordshire, 1976)…

  NO RAIN–BUT RED WATER COMING… Don’t forget PALUDRINE TABLETS–after breakfast… 16lbs–razor pool. Dynamite gang (6) apprehended. (India, 1986)…

  Chef (on seeing heavy line on table–40/45/50) “C’est la vrai guerre.” (Congo, 1991)…

  Dry season is Jun/Jul/Aug until Dec. Lots of fish (pacu) caught in channels at this time. On small live fish. Also on dead Java carp fished from houses at Yigai–at night after village has quietened down. (Papua New Guinea, 2010)…

  Wanted to get one of the brown ones out and they were around but another good sized one was positioned as shown. Let it take well, gently tighten, then up onto bank 51 inches (measured by hand)–about 15lbs ??… Vic: “They are scary things. They have huge power and come out of nowhere.” (New Zealand, 2010)…

  SQUID BOAT. Maria Felix IV (escorted by MFV & Guardacostas) skipper talking to other captain who caught 89kg POTA 2yrs ago–sin vísceras (est 8kg) = 97kg total. ie well clear of 200lb. (Pacific Ocean off Peru, 2015)…

  Zhōng huá xún–Chinese sturgeon. Bái xún–Chinese paddlefish… He thinks paddlefish are still there. They’ve picked up fish on sonar–can’t be sturgeon because they “can’t get over the dam.”–Saw the last paddlefish to be seen. “very beautiful”… Tracked with acoustic tag for 2 days then lost (river v high/fast at time). (China 2017)…

  I don’t know what it is, but I find there’s something about words that brings it back more powerfully than a photograph or video. The best pictures are in my head, and words bring the mental projector to life. As our symbiosis with electronic recording devices shades into parabiosis, we risk our memories becoming pale, generic things. It’s in
viting a kind of blindness. Words keep the imagination alive.

  They also lead to unexpected places. The first time any of my words appeared in print was a letter I wrote, in my early twenties, to the British Carp Study Group magazine. The next step took a few years. After returning from India in 1982, I managed to sell two articles to a fishing magazine, for forty and twenty-five pounds. This was when I first had the idea that my interest in far-flung fish might parlay into some kind of career. That turned out to be a bit over-optimistic, as I’m still waiting for the second payment. But I carried on: twenty years of traveling and fishing and writing it down, in between spells of being a teacher, advertising copywriter, barman, newspaper reporter, café worker and the rest. What I was also doing, I now see, was placing baits. A newspaper article here, a photograph there. Words and pictures. Glimpses of stories. Over time, the circling started and drew closer. I twitched the line and waited some more. Lady luck smiled, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  But although I now inhabit a different medium, I still carry my notebook everywhere. To the point where it has become something of a trademark, like Sherlock Holmes’s magnifying glass. And it symbolizes the same thing: that every visit to the water is an investigation.

  A notebook, for me, is also what transformed my fishing. And carrying it is a reminder of this: of the benefits, big and small, and sometimes unexpected, of trying to write it down.

  23

  I’m More Uncompetitive than You

  The water in Oklahoma is surprisingly cold in the spring, if you’ve been immersed in it for a couple of hours. Even with a shorty wetsuit under my clothes, I was shivering and wanted to get out. But I kept shoving my arm into hollows under rocks, and inside the rims of sunken truck tires. I was getting more miserable and despondent by the minute. We needed a fish but nothing was biting.

  It was my first attempt at catfish noodling: no rod, no line, no bait. Actually that’s not quite true: I was using myself as bait, specifically my hand, although a foot can work just as well. But I was not baiting in the normal sense, of offering a tasty treat. I was baiting in the sense of annoying, goading, or provoking. In the dark confines of the catfish’s nest the hand is an uninvited intruder, and the bite is an act of aggressive defense.

  I’d been hearing from old hands what this kind of bite feels like. If the fish takes you in deep and then spins, they said, its tooth pads will turn your forearm into hamburger meat. One man had his size-twelve army boot engulfed by a massive fish, which held him with his head under the water until his buddies rescued him. But a catfish bite can be preferable to the alternatives. There’s always the chance that your chosen hole is home to a beaver, or a water moccasin, or a hundred-pound snapping turtle. So I was nervous. But I also wanted to get it over with, and get warm.

  As the hours and days passed, however, it became clear that the catfish just weren’t there. Nesting is a seasonal activity. When the water starts to warm, the male fish finds a suitable cave and proceeds to tidy it up, sweeping away silt with his tail until the floor is clean and firm. Then it’s a case of waiting for a female to show up, spawning, and guarding the eggs. A trained human eye can spot many likely nesting places. Other spots are found by feeling around underwater. This can also yield other information: if the floor of the hole is silty, nobody’s home. And if, as I was finding, nobody’s home anywhere, no amount of trying harder is going to bring a result. Fishing at nearly the right time, in this case and many others, is fishing at the wrong time. And we were there, for various reasons, at the wrong time. We would have to rearrange my schedule and come back.

  Oklahoma take two. Tiny puffs of cloud drifted through the sky, giving no shade from the sun. The river was shrunken–in its box, as they say in the Amazon–and the water was comfortably warm. My two companions, Nate and Dillon, were explaining tactics for our first spot. This was a length of concrete pipe, angling down into the water. The bottom end was partially embedded in the riverbed, which had been excavated and landscaped to create a bespoke catfish love-nest, with a raised threshold and a deep hollow behind. The opening was too narrow for a torso, and an arm wasn’t going to have enough reach, so Dillon, being the most slender, was going to put his legs inside.

  The species we were after, the one most commonly fished in this way, was the flathead catfish (Pylodictis olivaris). The most secure place to grab one is by the protruding lower jaw, which is like an oversize suitcase handle, but it must be gripped very firmly, so the teeth can’t rasp. Because of the fish’s underbite, plus the upward angle of the pipe, Dillon turned face-down before ducking underwater and reversing himself in, having first taken a deep breath. Almost immediately there was a dull thud and an eruption of water inside the pipe. A fish had reacted. Dillon’s head appeared, gasping, just above the surface, and I went under to secure and retrieve the pinned fish. This all went well until the fish’s body was clear of the pipe, at which point it took all three of us, with a combined weight of over 500 pounds, to subdue forty pounds of fish and get the stringer cord threaded.

  Five minutes later we let it go. Nate reckoned it was too small to get us a top place in the competition. We were after something bigger.

  Prior to this, I had entered a fishing competition just once. A friend of mine belonged to his work fishing club, and he invited me to a club match, at a gravel pit in the Cotswolds. By fishing very light, I managed to catch a number of tiny rudd, and at the weigh-in I was surprised to learn that my total weight, barely a pound if I remember correctly, gave me second place, just fractionally behind the winner. This was when I realized that more fish had gone into my keepnet than had come out. Some of my fish had been so small that they’d swum out through the holes. (This was before the days of fine-mesh knotless nets.) At the time I joked about it, missing out on my rightful first place. But, I wonder, does the fact that this memory is still there, while many others from that time have completely evaporated, say anything about me?

  Our next catfish spot was very different. Walking barefoot along a sandy beach we arrived at the outside of a wide river bend. Here the bank was a steep earth cliff fringed by a flat ledge, where the crew set up. For several feet beyond the water’s edge the river was shallow, less than knee deep; then there was a drop-off, to more than waist deep. Just beyond the drop something poked through the surface. It was part of the mangled and rusting skeleton of a wrecked car, possibly dumped by a farmer years ago to try to slow the erosion of the bank.

  Easing ourselves down into the brisk flow, the three of us took up position tight to the drop-off. Nate had just given me a briefing, using a diagram drawn in the sand, explaining that the catfish hole was in the face of the drop-off. It was an arch-shaped opening, and we were right in front of it now. He had been pretty certain there would be a fish there, and this was confirmed when suddenly something rammed our legs. This time it was my turn to go and get it.

  There’s an important point of technique with noodling. When you reach into the hole your hand should be horizontal but your thumb should be pointing down, in contact with the riverbed. This way, the catfish can’t bite beyond the palm of your hand. This makes it easy to grab by the jaw and avoids harming the fish–unlike the regrettable practice of some noodlers, who will grab the gill rakers, which is no good for catch and release. The next thing is to stop the fish spinning, which is its default reaction to being grabbed. I had to be ready to pin it to the floor of the cave, or the wall, and at the same time reach forward with my other hand and grab the root of its pectoral fin. Otherwise, in the worst case, it could twist and pin me.

  ‘Every year people die noodling, from drowning,’ Nate had told me. ‘Sometimes their head’s close to the surface, and they just can’t quite get there.’ It’s the main reason you shouldn’t do it alone.

  With all this firmly fixed in my mind I ducked under. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face so I had to find the entrance by feel. Making sure I trailed my thumb, I followed the slope down from the threshold
. I was wearing gloves for protection, but my fingertips were bare–all the better for feeling fur, snake scales, or a turtle shell. But I felt nothing, just mud. My air was running out; it was time to come up.

  The entrance, I now knew, opened out to a very big space, and I hadn’t been in there far enough. I needed to get right inside. But how would I get out if my hands were full? We decided that Dillon would hold my ankles, wheelbarrow style, and pull me out when the time came. But how would he know when that was? We agreed I would shake my right leg, slowly for a slow extraction, quickly for quick. Then I had to reload the basics: mainly the whole thing about overriding the normal common-sense reflex, of trying to whip my hand away if it got bitten. I also had to avoid getting caught on tree roots or other snags.

  Because it was likely I’d be in the hole for some time, I started the breathing routine that I use for breath-hold diving. This is not to be confused with hyperventilating, which is potentially dangerous because it gets rid of carbon dioxide from the bloodstream, and with it the body’s need-to-breathe safety mechanism. Instead, this is all about breathing slowly and deeply to get the blood as fully oxygenated as possible, and to bring the heart rate down by calming the mind. I’d done some timed breath holds earlier in the day, lying on the ground and slowly increasing up to three minutes. This would translate to a confident minute or maybe ninety seconds underwater. Now, breathing from my diaphragm, I did one final exhale, pushing out everything I could, followed by a final, super-full inhale. Then under.

  With limited time, I couldn’t afford to be too cautious. The space kept going back and the darkness was absolute. But my fingers would be visible, perhaps, to a dark-adapted eye–belonging to something the size of a dog, something which could be in front of me right now. Or it would lock onto my hand because of its movement, the disturbance it caused in the water. I tried to visualize it as I told myself to be ready. Any moment now… and you must grab it back…