by Jeremy Wade
I was in past my waist, feeling the entrance brush my thighs, when it happened. It was a sound, a muffled explosion, as much as it was a clamping on my hand. I gripped in response and pushed down, as an inner voice took control: pin it to floor–other hand grip fin–shake leg slowly. As it came out I kept it wedged against the wall of the cave. Then I was in a position to get my head out and above the surface, in preparation for bringing the fish into the open. Here my plan was to step over its body and get it in a scissor grip, while the others supported me and put the stringer in. The fish, as expected, wasn’t co-operative. It was nothing like a fish that has been tired out on a line; at one point it even managed to put me in an arm lock, by twisting my wrist, before we had it secured.
All this above-surface chaos was recorded from the water’s edge by our veteran cameraman, Duncan Fairs, but the real action had been out of sight, underneath the ground where he stood. I asked if they’d managed to pick up the sound of the fish biting down. ‘Hear it?’ said Duncan. ‘I felt it through my legs!’
At the weigh-in the fish went fifty-three pounds, and we ended the day with a total of 155 pounds for our top three fish. This gave us top place in the competition, which was organized by a local church.
Since then I’ve caught a lot of other fish, but to this day that brown, somewhat slug-like ‘mudcat,’ pulled from the darkness of an underwater cave, is one of the catches that most sticks in my mind. But that’s nothing to do with winning the competition, and making good on my previous second place. There are other reasons. Recalling it now makes me think, and not for the first time, about why I fish.
When I first started fishing, I was spectacularly unsuccessful. One early spot was a shallow, clear cut off the Suffolk Stour, which ran through the village where I lived. Here I could see the fish darting between weed beds, but they never came near the lumps of bread that I flung at them. So I cast into the big river bend near our house, but my float stayed motionless. Nobody in my family fished, so nobody could tell me what I was doing wrong. I was just going through the motions, putting a line in the river because it was something that most village boys did at some point, ‘because it was there.’ It was a minor rite of passage, something which most duly passed through and then left behind. I nearly left it behind too, for the more exciting pastimes of tree-climbing, riding my bike, and clambering around on the forbidden scaffolding of building sites. In comparison, fishing seemed like an elaborate waste of time. But that changed when I finally caught a fish.
My school friend Simon knew how to catch fish because his grandfather was an angler. Near his house there was a semi-collapsed wooden bridge, overlooking a channel of dark, reed-fringed water. Here Simon lent me some gear that was more fit for purpose than my cheap plastic combo, gave me some basic instructions, and–hey presto!–there was a finger-sized roach flashing silver in front of me. I don’t know what exactly happened in that moment, in the recesses of my seven- or eight-year-old mind, and I had even less idea then, but it was like switching on an internal magnetic field, which was to exert a pull on the direction of events from then on.
At first it was just the novelty of catching any fish at all: gudgeon, perch, dace, more roach. And for a long time that was enough. I was aware that some people caught bigger fish, from other places, but that was a different reality from the one I inhabited. I tried to imagine a four-pound tench, what the pull of such a monster would feel like, before it inevitably broke my line. Then, from somewhere, I started to hear about ‘specimen hunting,’ the targeting and catching of big fish by design rather than by accident. At first it sounded unlikely: surely these people were just jackpot winners claiming, after the event, to have a system. Was it possible that there could be a system? I started some more in-depth reading of angling newspapers and magazines.
Thus began my pursuit of bigger fish. The system started, I learned, with stealth, patience, research, and belief. It was the beginning, and it started to work. From time to time I caught a fish that took two hands to hold. Among them was my first pike. At four pounds it was not a big one, but it was my first up-close contact with a predator. As such, it operated another internal switch: it activated that latent fascination with predators that we all have. It was a subtle but irreversible reconfiguration that would take me half a lifetime to understand.
Somewhere in that time I became aware of a fundamental division that was said to exist in British coarse fishing. At the other end of the spectrum from the specimen hunters were match anglers, who fished for numbers of fish, in competitions where the placings were determined by aggregate weight. And in this division I became aware of a certain snobbery: the fact that many big-fish anglers looked down on competition anglers, not because of the small size of the fish they caught, nor because of any shortcomings in their ability to catch fish, but because match anglers are, by definition, competitive.
I confess to getting caught up in that snobbery, which also extended to ‘pleasure anglers,’ the big group in the middle that included my younger self, in which I still had one foot if truth be told. The official line, with us specimen hunters, was that we weren’t competitive. Or if we were, we were in competition with the fish, whatever that meant. But something about this didn’t add up. A three-pound roach is a massive roach, but a three-pound pike is a tiddler. But how we know whether a particular fish is big or not is only with reference to what other people are catching. So our credo was built on an inherent contradiction. Just because we deny our competitive nature doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
In fact the competitiveness of specimen hunters doesn’t bear much comparison with that of match anglers. In a fishing match, where competitors fish at the same time in the same water, drawing lots for randomized pegs, it’s the closest thing possible to a controlled experiment, where the only significant variable is the anglers’ differing levels of skill. Big-fish anglers don’t want to fish like that, which is fair enough, but our playing field is a complex landscape where the angler’s ability is but one of many variables. Chief among these are time and place. Some people spend much more time fishing than others, and some places are not open to all. Many anglers, being thoughtful people, acknowledge this and attempt to address it. Some carp anglers go for big fish that have never been caught before; others target big fish from public waters. This is consistent with an old saying about a fisherman’s progress: that our obsession moves on from any fish to the biggest fish–and thence to the most difficult fish.
This is where it gets interesting, because it moves us into an area where objective measurements don’t exist. Even at a point in history where almost every aspect of our lives is reduced to numbers and governed by algorithms, it’s a place beyond all this, where other values still hold. There are no universal gauges of difficulty, no quantitative comparisons. It is up to us, individually and subjectively, to decide what is meaningful and what isn’t.
For me, I remain in thrall of big fish–I can’t shake that–but what sets a capture apart is its story. Many of the best stories are about testing limits, overcoming fear perhaps, or exhaustion. Sometimes the story is a lesson, or a parable. And sometimes you can’t put your finger on why a particular story has such power. It’s just something you feel, personal to you, beyond numbers and words.
A fifty-three-pound flathead catfish is a respectable fish, but not exceptional. It’s less than half the size of the rod-caught record. Thinking about it now, I could probably have caught it on a line, by threading a heavy rod into that underwater hole. That would have made quite a story.
But it would have been a lesser story.
24
Going Under Again
I dislike the term ‘extreme angling,’ which is sometimes applied to what I do. But I can’t think of a better two-word summary, so I’m stuck with it. The idea of doing things that are off the normal spectrum, however, greatly appeals to me–although when it comes to putting that idea into practice, it sometimes gets complicated. Some things are only enjoy
ed retrospectively.
Possibly the most extreme fishing I’ve done was sending a bait down more than 2,000 feet into an oceanic trench. A line wasn’t necessary because I was going down there with it. We were trying to film six-gill sharks (Hexanchus griseus), a deep-water species that is rarely observed. Diving was out of the question for the depths that would be necessary, but then somebody came up with the idea of a submersible. The problem was finding a vessel available in the right place. And the other thing, when we looked into it, was that the cost would be astronomical. So originally we’d scrapped the idea of getting any in-the-wild footage. We’d decided, if possible, to show them on the end of a line instead.
Ascension Island, a volcanic speck of land next to the mid-Atlantic ridge, halfway between Brazil and Angola, was our base for that scene. We took off from RAF Brize Norton (just months before this flight was suspended) and eight hours later landed just south of the equator. And in no time at all we’d confirmed the special richness of the water here. Day two saw me taking four and a half hours to bring in a 248lb yellowfin tuna, something that still takes some believing. Having recovered from that, it was time to go after the six-gills.
Just before nightfall, with land visible as a grey smudge on the moving horizon, we anchored up on the edge of the drop-off. I weighted a hunk of dead fish with a big lump of rock and lowered it 300 feet to the bottom. Then it was a case of concentrating on the rod-tip and correlating its movement with the movement of the boat, and being alert for anything anomalous. This came, eventually, in the form of an out-of-synch nod, followed by what looked like a slightly increased bend. The boat was equipped with a fighting chair, for marlin anglers, but I was fishing ‘stand-up’ style, so I quickly transferred the rod to the harness that I was already wearing in readiness. From the look of the rod, the consensus was that there was something there, so I started winding down, to set the big circle hook. It was like winding tight to the ocean floor, which then started moving.
For the next forty minutes I shuffled and staggered back and forth along the transom as the boat pitched up and down in the swell. The rod had become a tightly compressed spring, transmitting force equally to me and to the fish. It was one of those situations where the weakest link is not a swivel or a crimp or a knot or the 130lb main line, but the person attached to the rod. In my mind I had a picture of a foot slipping and me being catapulted over the side. So it was good to know that the deck hand was behind me, holding on to my belt, as insurance against that happening. It wasn’t that the fish was running; it was just the sheer weight, like trying to winch up a grand piano. The drag was almost fully locked, but even so I had to nudge the lever forward a fraction, and use my fingers to hold the spool when raising the rod. In this way, inch by inch, I put line onto the reel, only to lose it again. But somehow, almost imperceptibly, the amount of line on the reel grew. The swivel at the end of the leader appeared above the surface and gloved hands grabbed the coated wire. A couple more minutes and a grey blunt-nosed beast with a long, sinuous tail was secured at the back of the boat. It was about fourteen feet long and 1,100 pounds. We had our six-gill!
Over the next three nights I had three more, the biggest around 1,300 pounds. To two of these fish we attached special tags that would log temperature, light, and, most importantly, depth. These tags would eventually pop to the surface and relay that information to a satellite, helping to increase understanding of these rarely seen creatures. To complete the work-out I also caught two Galapagos sharks, which look very similar to bull sharks, the biggest around ten feet long and 500 pounds, and a surprise tiger shark, now a rarity in these waters. This was a huge male, twelve or thirteen feet long and weighing perhaps 900 pounds, which is about as big as the males grow.
But most of these fish never made it into the program, because we found a solution for our underwater six-gill shots. There was a deep-diving submersible based on the island of Roatán in the Caribbean, just off the coast of Honduras and right next to the Cayman Trench. But this was not the kind of vessel that came complete with a mother ship and business-class seats. This was home-made by a young American expat who, I was told, built his first sub in his parents’ garden when he was a teenager, out of plumbing parts. I was given the option to politely decline, but our research team were quietly confident and there was already a collective excitement in the air. From the comfort of an airy office I said yes, and the countdown started.
Although six-gills live in perpetual darkness, they are known to migrate upward in the water column at night. During the daytime they would be beyond the range of the sub, so the plan was to go down after sunset. I don’t mind admitting that my apprehension was already pretty high, and this cranked it up another notch, but it’s that basic principle of fishing again: the importance of the right time. As for the right place, we were governed by the desirability of staying safe and alive. The Cayman Trench goes down nearly five miles (to 25,000 feet), but the sub is designed to operate only to a depth of half a mile, or a little more (3,000 feet). So we would stick to the upper part of the slope.
Bait, when you’re hoping to find a carnivore, needs to be some kind of meat. Arriving during the day to give the sub a once-over, we were just in time to help its designer and pilot, Karl Stanley, lash a dead pig to a simple wooden frame that he had bolted to the front of the vessel.
It was also time to try the passenger quarters for size. Entering the top hatch I lowered myself into a vertical space made from two steel spheres welded together. This is where Karl stands when he’s driving. Then it was a crouch and an awkward feet-forward shimmy through a knee-high entrance into a second chamber. Hunched forward on the bench seat, I looked out at the friendly faces on the other side of the convex viewport as I tried to imagine what it was going to be like with sixty atmospheres of pressure on the other side: nearly 900 pounds pushing against every square inch. I was still thinking about this when I got out, as I squinted at the rubber seal in the entrance hatch. From my days of rebuilding motorbikes, I know how crucial it is to keep O-rings scrupulously clean, if you want liquids to stay out of places where they shouldn’t be. Karl clocked me doing this and read my mind.
‘It doesn’t matter about that,’ he said, adding by way of explanation that the metal surfaces would be pressing together so hard that the seal would be redundant. The four-inch-thick acrylic window in front of me would also compress and shrink, pushing further into its beveled seating.
Despite all this, part of me, of course, couldn’t wait. The thought of where we were planning to go, and what we were hoping to see, made me dizzy. When the time came to board for real, I was joined up front by Steve Shearman, whose idea this had been. Steve was the director of this episode, but there was no way he could direct from the surface, since there was no communication of any kind with the sub. There was also no way we could get a third person in that space, so Steve hefted the camera, plus spare batteries and memory cards, and told cameraman Ross Hamilton to get a good night’s sleep: it would be his turn tomorrow.
In the dying light we slipped away from the dock and crossed the surface of the shallow bay. My domed port was already submerged, allowing just intermittent splashy glimpses of evening sky, but the hatch remained open for our last taste of fresh air. After a few minutes we were crossing the reef. Then the reef dropped away. A couple of minutes later we stopped. Karl closed the hatch and flooded the ballast compartments, and down we went. He had weighed us and our kit beforehand, and adjusted onboard weighting to make the four-ton vessel just fifteen pounds negatively buoyant when it had no air in the ballast, which gave a gentle but purposeful rate of descent. Looking out through the port I saw illuminated flecks and particles drifting upward. At a depth of fifty feet there was a dull percussive thud. Before setting off, out of curiosity, we’d tied a sealed metal bottle to the outside. Like the sub it contained air at atmospheric pressure. Unlike the sub, it had just collapsed into two dimensions.
Reaching the bottom took forty-five minutes. Thr
ough the porthole I saw a sloping white moonscape with protruding black rocks. Karl maneuvered for a minute to find a place that was a bit more horizontal, and we landed. He told us not to expect to see anything for three or four hours, but tonight turned out to be unusual. We’d not long switched to red lights, which are invisible to six-gills, when a pale, huge shape drifted by, on the periphery of the light… but then everything went quiet.
I felt something nudge me in the back, and Karl passed me a small black box with a simple digital display. ‘This number here should be between 16 and 24,’ he said. ‘When it gets low, crack a little oxygen.’ With that he passed through a metal cylinder with a knurled tap, then curled up in the tiny space behind us. ‘If anything happens, hit my foot. I’ll be right here.’
It shouldn’t have seemed strange that he was settling down to sleep. Underwater is his second home. It’s not a lot different from dozing in a bivvy, waiting for the buzzer to go. But his laid-back air is misleading: he is single-minded and passionate about what he does to an extent that is truly rare. When I’d asked how he’d ended up building and piloting submarines, he’d replied, ‘I read a book when I was eight.’ And I sensed there was no likelihood that the novelty would ever wear off.
Steve and I, meanwhile, struggled to process this new experience. The red light made me think of a campfire in the desert, and such was the clarity outside that it appeared like air, a night without stars. It was almost possible to imagine opening the hatch and going out for a walk. But then a reality check: out there the air in a pair of human lungs would compress to almost nothing, about the volume of a cigarette packet. It was quite a thing to contemplate, as we sat waiting in the belly of our benevolent metal beast.
