How to Think Like a Fish

by Jeremy Wade

  Less than half an hour later a jarring on the line sent my pulse racing. Then a pause, building by the moment to the inevitable run, which I answered. Finally the connection was made, and the fish started little by little to come in. Nobody wanted to touch the fish when it surfaced at our feet, so I thrust the rod at someone and grabbed it by the pectoral fins. Sixty-six pounds of muscle, ugliness, teeth, tentacles… and blessed relief.

  But if I hadn’t recast, I might still be waiting.

  Holding the rod gives me other information about what’s happening under the water. This information travels up the line, and I read it with the tip of my index finger, which rests lightly on the line above the reel. I’m like a spider at the center of a web, picking up the tiniest signs that something may be about to fall into my trap.

  It’s surprising what can transmit through the river noise. In 1986 I spent many days fishing a rocky channel on the Kaveri River in South India. Bait was millet flour paste, rolled into fist-sized balls, which were then boiled to make them resistant to small fish–which were sometimes catfish and pink carp weighing a couple of pounds. Even so, these small fish would still peck away at the bait, and I could feel this even with forty to sixty yards of line out, in water that would have swept me away. But these nibbles were reassurance that the bait was still there. I could also imagine the attention of the ‘nuisance’ fish attracting the hump-back mahseer (Tor remadevii) that I was after, which would inhale the entire bait with ease. But if there had been no plucks for a while, it usually signaled that the bait had been broken up, or whittled down to nothing, which would be confirmed when I retrieved. (I would not retrieve too hastily, though, in case the silence had been caused by a bigger fish approaching.) In this way I avoided fishing long periods with a bare hook, which helped me catch a haul of fish from this channel (in five weeks’ fishing) that would be unimaginable anywhere in India today: seven mahseer between thirty-eight and sixty-one pounds, plus an armor-plated monster of ninety-two pounds. Hence my faith in the single-rod approach.

  But back in Argentina, I’m coming under more and more pressure to justify that belief, to the crew and myself. Yes, multiple rods can cover more places, and multiple bait options. It’s standard practice in carp fishing. And it’s the same thing when trolling lures behind a boat: it enables you to try different depths and different patterns at the same time. I’m not arguing with any of this. If everything else is equal, or nearly equal, it makes sense to put out more than one line–and there have been times when I have done just that.

  But more often, other factors are not equal, and the disadvantages can cancel out any advantage. One risk is that you hook a big fish on one line, and it swims through the other line. If somebody is with you, you get them to quickly bring the other line (or lines) in, before that happens. But what if this other line snags, and you can’t quickly free it? Suppose you’re fishing from a boat and the fish, meanwhile, is steaming off downriver, and you need to chase after it. What do you do with the snagged line? Who is operating the boat? Can they do two things at once? Whatever you end up doing (chop through the line, losing half a spool of expensive braid?), you have lost focus on the fish, and that loss of focus could mean you also lose the fish. And that may have been your only chance.

  You could argue that losing a fish in this way is a case of very bad luck. In fact what has happened is failure to think ahead and ask, ‘What if…?’ In other words it’s human error. Or you might have thought it through and concluded that the benefits outweighed any risks. But if you lose a fish having done this, it means you got it wrong.

  So, the counter argument goes (in places where they don’t have regulations that forbid this), you spread out your rods. You park an extra one up the bank over there, another one over there, and you rig some audible bite alarms or get someone to keep an eye. But now you can’t react quickly when you get a take. With some fish, such as alligator gar, this isn’t a problem. They move off slowly, in open water, towing the over-depth float, and you can quietly take your time to react. But normally, if you’re after a big fish, you have to be right on top of the rod, fishing with proper attention. And if you’re not, you’ll pay in missed opportunities.

  Another big consideration, for the kind of fishing I do, is bait. Baitfish can be a rare commodity, requiring precious time to catch. Suppose you spend an hour catching three small fish. You bait up three lines, and settle back to wait. But there are piranhas in the water. The ones in the Río Paraná are large and golden-colored, and known as palometa. If palometa find the bait, the line will start to jump, and each jump is a big mouthful of bait gone. If you notice this, you can quickly retrieve what’s left and cast elsewhere. If you don’t notice, you’ve just lost one of your baits, and you’re fishing with a bare hook. If you’re using three rods, you’ll run out of bait in a third of the time, or less, that you’ll have fishing with one rod. Personally I’d rather fish one rod effectively for a whole morning than chuck three lines out for just an hour or two.

  In other words: just because you apply a multiplication factor to the equation doesn’t mean that the overall chance of success is increased. If the effectiveness of each rod is compromised, your chances of a big fish can actually be reduced.

  Also, you might not have enough outfits that are appropriate for the fish you are after. So you put out a rod that isn’t up to the job. Here in Argentina, under pressure to get a result, this is what I end up doing. I have one outfit in which I have total confidence: a rod with plenty of backbone, rigged with a big multiplier and 150lb braid. And I’ve put together something else from what I have available: a serviceable multiplier loaded with 80lb mono, and a short 30lb-class boat rod.

  I’ve also decided to do something else differently. Until now I’ve been concentrating on classic stingray spots: those places out of the main current, where the water turns. Typically these have been at the downstream end of an island, or just below a bulge in the bank. On this stretch of the Paraná there are also small channels that cut across many of the islands. Where these channels debouch into deeper water are also alleged stingray haunts. But none of these places has delivered. Maybe they are the right places, and it’s just a matter of time–lots more time. Sometimes, with big, rare fish, that’s the way it is. But I don’t have lots more time.

  A snippet of local intelligence has come my way. Yesterday somebody fishing for dorado (Salminus brasiliensis) hooked a stingray, and I’ve managed to pin down where that happened. It was in a spot very different from those I’ve been fishing: in a deep, steady push of water alongside the bank of an island. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t try for a fish that someone else has lost until it has had time to recover from the experience. The chances are, it’s not going to feed for a day or two. But these big stingrays are different. They are so heavy and powerful that on tackle designed for 20lb fish this thing wouldn’t even have registered that it was hooked–even with the poor guy in the boat desperately heaving on his line until it broke.

  So now I’m anchored up in the flow, and both baits are downstream of the boat: a swamp eel on the big rod, and a knife fish on the other rod, slightly closer. The baits have not been out very long when one of the lines moves. It’s the smaller rod. I pick it up and feel a steady pull, followed by another. I tighten and pull back and there’s a wrench that rips line from the drag. Then it stops, and it feels as if I’m attempting to lift the entire riverbed. It’s clearly a stingray, and a very big one.

  José the boatman scrambles to bring in the other line, hauls up the anchor, and then maneuvers so that I’m pulling from directly overhead. Along the edge of the island are several fallen trees, and I’m not sure how far they extend underwater. My big worry is that the fish will take the line into a snag, in which case it will all be over…

  After half an hour I’m convinced that the line is already snagged, because there has been no movement, and there is no sensation of anything alive on the line. I ask José to drop down-current a few feet then
reposition so I’m pulling from the other side of the boat, at a slightly different angle. Again I wind down and lift, but the rod-tip stays where it is. This rod just doesn’t have the lifting power I need. All that happens is a tighter and tighter curve, beyond anything it was designed to do, until the drag yelps in protest.

  I’ve set the drag to slip before the 80lb line gets close to breaking point. This gives a safety margin, which I now have to eat into. Locking the spool with my fingers I heave again. The rod bends further and my back sends a message to quit what I am doing to it, but this time there’s an answering pulse and I gain some line. But then the rod is wrenched down and everything is immobile as before. The feeling grows that I am never going to see this fish.

  Two hours pass. I’m still attached to it, and José’s concentration has not wavered, as he continues to hold position in the current, but the situation seems futile. What do we do? Somehow I manage to lift it again, and when I look up I see that we are no longer alongside the snaggy bank; we have come some way downstream. But even though the fish is now unstuck from the bottom, it is clearly a massive animal, and my gear simply isn’t strong enough to lift it to the surface–at least, not up through the water column. Unlike most other fish, stingrays are negatively buoyant, so even if they are inert they are a heavy weight on the line. My only chance is to exert a lateral pull and bring it along the bottom into progressively shallower water–which is exactly what’s coming up now, where the island tapers to a sandy tail. But if the current sweeps us past, we’ll be in a huge expanse of open water, and my chance will be gone.

  José angles the boat across the current and the fish is coming with us, an unseen bulk dragging the bottom and catching the flow. The bow scrapes sand and I jump out. Then the sight I never thought I’d see: a huge sandy-colored disc, like an underwater UFO. In the center is a cockpit-like hump, where the spiracles open and close like black eyes. These two holes in the middle of its back are where it takes in clean water for the gills, instead of through its mouth, which is mostly in contact with riverbed sediment. They are also the only place where, donning stab-proof gauntlets, I can get hold of it, to make sure it has fully run aground.

  Finally I have the fish I wanted, but it so nearly didn’t happen. I nearly never hooked it, and then I nearly never landed it. What lesson has this taught me?

  Did using a second rod catch me a fish that I wouldn’t have caught otherwise? Or did it nearly cost me a fish that would have found my other bait anyway? What I do know is that, under pressure to get a result, I broke one of my most important rules: I put out a rod that was not strong enough for the biggest fish that I might possibly hook. I should have known better, especially with a stingray. Because with stingrays it’s very much about brute force–it’s one fish that you can’t ‘play’ on light gear. The fact that it took me and José three hours and fifty minutes to get in is a measure of how close I came to failing. Faced with a similar situation now, I wouldn’t put out a second outfit if it were inadequate.

  Two equally strong outfits is another question. Fishing down-current off the back of a boat, this may increase the chance of a take, but not to the point where it’s doubled. At the same time, though, it reduces the chance of converting a take into a fish landed–maybe not by very much, but any decrease is significant. And if there’s only going to be one chance, as is often the case with big fish, then it increases the likelihood of failure. In this way multiple lines can just give an opportunity to mess things up earlier, which is hardly an advantage. More haste less speed. And for me this downside is enough to make me think very carefully about using two or more rods.

  In other words, if your thinking follows the logic of conventional, everyday math (2 × 1 = 2), you may think doubling up increases your chance of a fish. But other factors will not be equal; you are introducing handicaps and limitations. So in the strange math of fishing for big fish, increasing the number of lines in the water may actually reduce your chances (2 × 1 < 1).

  This is why, in many situations, I prefer to stick to a single rod. And if possible–unless I’m dug in for the night, for example–I prefer to hold the rod, and fish with undivided attention.

  15

  When the Right Time Is the Wrong Time

  A bad workman blames his tools. Some then compound the excuse by claiming that the questionable equipment was thrust upon them. That’s what I found myself doing one afternoon in eastern Nicaragua, in a mangrove-lined creek on the Mosquito Coast, an anomalous region of Central America where, alongside some Spanish, they speak a Creole language based on English.

  The tarpon had been on my line for over an hour. In the early minutes it had twice flung itself completely clear of the water, but having failed to throw the fly or crack the leader it had changed tactics. It was now in close, swimming in circles around my inflatable float tube, without seeming to tire at all. My feet, strapped into dive fins, worked furiously under the water as I maneuvered to keep the fish away from the mangroves, but beyond that I wasn’t making any impression. It was a stalemate. I knew what I had to do, but the fish wouldn’t let me do it.

  What I had to do, and what I kept trying to do, was this. Grip the fly line against the rod handle and pull about ten feet of line off the reel. Then, while the tarpon was circling, quickly pay it that line under reduced tension, so it found itself breaking out of the circle and heading in a straight line, at a tangent. While it was doing this, I would kick my fins as hard as I could, to bring me into a position where I was directly behind the fish, and able to haul straight back against its direction of travel. But I couldn’t get my craft to move quickly enough. Every time I tried this trick, the fish would twig and revert to its circling.

  The problem was, my float tube was too big. The production team had decided that the normal armchair-style model looked too much like an item of swimming-pool furniture, so we’d gone for what was basically an inflatable canoe with a hole in the floor. But it had twice the bulk and twice the inertia. And now I discovered it had another drawback.

  A tarpon is able to gulp air into its swim bladder and extract oxygen from that air using blood vessels inside the bladder. And that’s what this one was doing now, at intervals making leisurely glides up to the surface and back down, like a marathon runner downing energy drinks on the move. In the armchair-type float tube, which is open at the front, you see when the tarpon is about to do this and shove the rod-tip under the water, which stops it from reaching the surface. But with high sides all around me I couldn’t do this. It got to the point where I didn’t know what to do: the fish was so close but its energy seemed inexhaustible. Despite heaving against it with heavy fly line and 175lb leader, on a 12-weight rod in a flat curve, it mocked my attempts to control it. It crossed my mind that if I’d been in a normal boat, with a second pair of hands and a landing net, I’d have it in by now, but that was no consolation. I’d tried fishing from a boat, and it doesn’t work here. This fish would have spooked and wouldn’t have taken the fly. It was the giant duck-man approach or nothing.

  But as an angler tires, so too does the fish. For the umpteenth time I spun and kicked, and this time the tarpon was too slow to react, and I brought it to a grudging halt. With its momentum gone, it had to summon energy from its reserves to restart. It was a palpable shift in the balance of power. I had overcome the handicap of my too-heavy vessel, but my energy was also getting low. We were like a couple of boxers on the ropes, but I could now see a way to an outcome in my favor. A few more successful spin-and-kick maneuvers and I was getting close to the point where I could maybe grab the leader. But this end game, the time of getting hands on the fish, is also the time when any error is most likely to be punished.

  It’s a time for judgment, technique, speed and surprise. First, you have to get the fish to within a few feet, and pick a moment to act. What you have to do is lift the rod-tip from its low position close to the water into a position above you or even extended slightly behind, to bring the line in close enough
to reach. With such a flexible rod, you can only do this by paying line out from the reel and easing the pressure on the fish. As with the anti-circling maneuver, the line-release has to be done in two stages: with the ‘live’ line trapped against the rod handle pull a long loop of slack from the reel, then quickly release this slack while raising the rod. With the rod vertical, you are now ‘high sticking,’ something which in normal circumstances is not recommended. There is a dangerously acute angle between rod and line. If the fish takes off now you must drop the rod-tip immediately; otherwise it will snap. If the fish is still where you want it, however, you extend your free hand and grasp the leader. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.

  In order to get a grip on the thin, smooth line, it’s necessary to wrap it once or twice around your hand. But if you do this unthinkingly and make the wraps from the line above your hand, and the fish decides to bolt, you could be in trouble. Even if you open your hand, the line can tighten around it, rather than spilling off. If this happens, you could end up in the water attached to a fish that weighs well over a hundred pounds, which is potentially a very dangerous scenario if you can’t release yourself. If you’ve ever tried to break 175lb line with your hands you know that this isn’t possible…