How to Think Like a Fish Page 3
Later I discovered why I had such a slow start to my carp-fishing career. Some of the waters I fished didn’t have any carp in them. I was fishing for rumors.
It was an early lesson in the importance of fishing the right place–as in the right water. And it’s what happens, sometimes, when you fish where other anglers don’t.
More recently, in 1993, I took myself to the Brazilian Amazon, on a mission to catch an arapaima (Arapaima gigas), which is often said to be the largest freshwater fish in the world. I’d done what research I could, but I had no clear destination. It hadn’t been possible to narrow my search down to a specific place. In the end it wasn’t quite sticking a pin in the map, but it wasn’t far off. I settled on the Rio Purus, one of the Amazon’s southern tributaries. The Purus is a ‘white-water’ river, meaning it flows heavy with sediment from the Andes–which in fact gives it a milky-brown coloration. This is significant because, unlike the Amazon’s clear-water and black-water tributaries, it is rich in the nutrients necessary for aquatic life. It promised an abundant ecosystem, all the way from swarms of biting insects right up to the fabled super-predator of the floodplain lakes.
My plan was to go as remote as possible, beyond the reach of the subsistence fishermen. To help me navigate the human environment, I had done three months of intensive language study–a solid three hours every day. And I was well prepared for the rigors and uncertainties of traveling that lay in wait, having made three expeditions to the much tougher Congo rainforest in equatorial Africa. So I was confident of success.
My three months in Brazil brought me a grand total of zero arapaima. I finally got a small one, four feet long and weighing maybe forty-five pounds, six years later, after going back every year in between.
In my defense, I caught lots of other fish, and I got sidetracked for far too long looking for freshwater dolphins and anacondas. But it’s still failure on an epic scale. Based on this I’m the last person who should be giving anyone any advice on how to fish–at least on where to fish. Or perhaps not, because there is an important point to this story.
Most of the Amazon, it turns out, is nothing like what we see on nature documentaries, where it seems you can hardly move without tripping over boa constrictors and jaguars. Unlikely as it sounds, there is a huge commercial fishing industry, much of it to feed the two million inhabitants of Manaus, the improbable city at the heart of the region. Countless boats, carrying tons of ice, make voyages of hundreds of miles up the winding tributaries–especially the Purus–catching fish and buying fish from locals. Back then, lack of ice and refrigeration in the remoter parts was no help to the arapaima, thanks to the market for their dried, salted flesh and the general lack of other ways for people to get cash. I remember asking José where I could find a lake where the arapaima fishermen didn’t go. He snorted at my naivety and said, ‘They get everywhere.’
I later saw just how true that was, when I made some sorties with a team of arapaima hunters. They were like guerrilla missions behind enemy lines, days on end going deep into uninhabited jungle, living off the river and a small supply of coffee, sugar and manioc flour. To reach lakes that had no access by water, we dragged the heavy wooden canoes through swamps and forest.
When they arrived at a lake, the fishermen would quietly watch to locate the arapaima, which surface at intervals of up to half an hour to gulp air. This behavior enables arapaima to keep hunting as water and oxygen levels fall–but it has become their Achilles heel. Then the nets were deployed, hanging like curtains from surface to bottom. If necessary the fishermen would dive down to clear and even saw through snags that might hold the nets off the bottom. Then they beat the water with sticks to drive the fish into the meshes. They also used harpoons to probe for fish that had learned to lie low and stay quiet. Fishing this way, if a lake is small and not too deep and snaggy, a team of netsmen can completely empty it of arapaima, everything apart from the baby two- and maybe three-footers, which slip through the mesh. It is tactical and ruthless, and it has to be seen to understand why a lone angler with a rod just can’t compete, and why any rare escapees can be almost supernaturally wary.
So those faded photographs I’d seen, of barrel-wide arapaima harpooned from the Rio Purus, alongside beached manatees with their nostrils plugged to suffocate them, were only part of the story. Unlike non-existent carp, there was hard evidence for their existence in the past. But arapaima hunters don’t catch and release. The fact that a lake, or a region, held arapaima in 1910, or even 1970, means nothing today.
These two experiences, with carp and arapaima, taught me a lot about the importance of research. I could have saved myself a lot of time, trouble and disappointment by only fishing waters where there had been documented carp captures. But on my arapaima hunt, there were no documented rod-and-line captures to go on–that was my whole reason for wanting to catch one. Looking back, conventional wisdom says I should have bailed out of the Purus sooner than I did, and tried elsewhere. Certainly when I did so, I found that arapaima in less pressured waters are normally much easier to tempt. But I find I have (almost) no regrets, because in this case my inefficient angling brought a level of understanding–of this emblematic fish and the state of its Amazon home–that I wouldn’t have come to otherwise. There are times, it turns out, when angling is not the be-all and end-all, but a door to something else.
It’s also true, of course, that it’s necessary to experience some failure to calibrate our appreciation of success. Not enough failure should prompt as many questions as not enough success.
Nowadays, though, I don’t have the luxury of time. If I don’t get a fish I risk being out of a job. No fin no fee, as somebody, maybe me, once quipped. And that really concentrates the mind: I can’t afford to go to the wrong place.
Of all the things I have to consider for the kind of fishing that I do, to bring about the magical convergence of right bait, right place and right time, place is the component with the widest range of possibilities. There’s a lot of water out there, way too much to explore in a single lifetime, so it’s a process of narrowing down. I start by researching the geographical range of my target species, as far as this is possible, in books and online, long before I go anywhere near the water. But this is only the start. Most big freshwater fish, in most parts of the world, have all but disappeared from most places where they used to live. As with arapaima, the main reason is over-harvesting, but there are other factors too. Dams block the migration routes of many fish, so they disappear from the water above the dam–or even altogether, if breeding grounds are cut off. Draining of floodplains, cutting off backwaters, competition from invasive species and pollution also play a part. And sometimes it’s just willful slaughter, as was the case with North American alligator gar in the early 1900s, thanks to the incorrect assumption that killing these predators would boost populations of ‘game’ fish. Consequently it’s a sad fact of life that most big fish now tend to be restricted to isolated pockets here and there, which can be hard to find.
To locate these special places, it’s a matter of keeping one’s antennas active, of tuning in to the buzz and whisper of the water people. It’s a world of tip-offs and informants, of reading between the lines, of triangulating one source with another, to weed out the wishful thinking, the exaggerations and misinformation. It’s about correlation and extrapolation, about building a meaningful picture from mere scraps and fragments. In other words, it’s an extension of what I used to do when I was fishing in England: the same principles but with less information. Except sometimes there’s so little information that it seems to shift into something else, more like astronomy. When I first considered going to Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, in search of goliath tigerfish, the place was an information black hole. In the end there was no alternative to going in blind. It was a miserable two-month blank trip, but an invaluable recon. (I ended up in an area where it can be both dry season and flood season at the same time–work that one out!–with the fish dispersed throughout the forest
and even netsmen going hungry. In other words: right place, wrong time.) Now though, after more than three decades of doing this kind of thing, in various far-flung corners, I’m in the happy position of having done the leg work, and the paddle work, and knowing the basic lie of the water. With this mental framework in place it’s easier to extract meaning from new wisps of intel, and to set off with some degree of confidence.
Once on location, the narrowing down continues. I talk to people, and try to find reliable sources, to take me to a deeper layer of detail. So important is this that, even if I have a translator, I try to learn some basics of the language in advance, at least some greetings and key fish-related vocabulary. A little of this can go a very long way, thanks to the fact that fishing itself is a universal language. Wherever I go, the curiosity is mutual, and I invariably find a first-rate accomplice. Gaining trust, though, is a circuitous process and takes time. In places where they haven’t seen rod-and-line fishing before, there’s usually disbelief at first that my thin line is capable of catching the big fish I’m after. Then they see how my super-light gear works–how near-invisible line, rigged on a reel that yields and a flexible rod, can bring in an arm-sized catfish–and how my fine 150lb braid can present a bait in places and ways that aren’t possible with a thick 300lb handline or a length of rope, and there’s a eureka moment. Where this then leads, if I’m lucky, is to a collaborative process whereby we catch a fish that neither of us, working alone, would ever have seen.
In short, then, finding the right place is all about good information, about tapping in to local intelligence–particularly if time is limited. Only right at the end–the final zeroing-in of the cross-hairs and divining the coordinates in three dimensions–does it change, sometimes, into something else. But up until that point it’s information, information, information, whatever kind of fishing you are doing.
Or you can ignore everything I’ve said and fish for rumors. A good angler studies the rules for the very purpose, sometimes, of breaking them. In fact there can be special delight in tearing up the rules and scattering them to the wind, because fishing is also about the power of hope, sometimes against all odds. And sometimes it is about the miraculous.
STREAM
5
Think Like a Fish
On a slanting rock beside the river, an electronic buzzer sounds and a dim green light shows thick nylon line rolling off an improbably large reel. Hands reach down and pick up the rod, then push the drag lever forward. With the spool now locked, the growing tension in the line starts to transmit in both directions. What happens now could determine how this ends. Not enough of a pause and the strike may not set the hook; too much and the bait may be ejected. So there’s an instant of intense weighing and calculation, before the rod pulls up and back–and is wrenched down in response.
It’s the moment this creature, which until then had existed only in my imagination, becomes real…
I was in Guyana, on the northern fringe of South America, fishing the Essequibo River. Although the rainforest here merges with that of the Amazon, the Essequibo is not part of the Amazon River system–but over geological time there have been connections, so it’s home to many Amazonian fish species. I was here because, unlike most of the Amazon, the interior of Guyana hasn’t suffered too much from commercial fishing. As a result this sparsely populated region is something of a wildlife refuge, and a highly promising location for hunting big Amazonian fish. Or at least that used to be the case. In the two years since I had last been here, things seemed to have changed.
The fish I was after is a solid, streamlined, shark-colored catfish that’s capable of reaching astounding sizes. Ten feet long and 400 pounds is a realistic estimate of what might have lurked here and there in South America a century ago. But nowadays, thanks to decades of long lines and jug lines (baits fished under free-floating buoys), their numbers have crashed. The chances of encountering an outsize specimen are now vanishingly small.
In English this fish is known as the goliath catfish (Brachyplatystoma filamentosum), but it’s known here as the lau-lau, and over the border in Brazil as the piraiba or filhote. The latter roughly translates as ‘little one,’ a back-handed nod to its potential size. (A decapitated five-foot slab in a fish market might be described to you as ‘a nice little one.’) On previous attempts on a couple of rivers I’d actually done quite well with this present-day rarity: I’d managed to catch a dozen or so. But they’d all been small, nothing much over a hundred pounds. On the Rio Araguaia in Brazil I’d once hooked something much bigger. But after towing the boat for several minutes, it set off on an eighty-yard run straight down–in water just thirty feet deep. As I struggled to process this, my boatman told me it must have gone under an illegal long line–a rope set across the riverbed, with shorter lengths at intervals bearing hooks. Eventually I got most of the line back in, but it then became clear I was never going to get fish plus rope to the surface, or to the bank. Since that day I’d been after a rematch with a big one.
But this time in Guyana the signs weren’t good. Normally for an hour-long episode we like to get another fish species or two, besides our main target, as an appetizer for the main course, and in the past the Essequibo had been very obliging. A lure cast to the eddies below rocks would bring hits from peacock bass (actually not bass but large predatory cichlids)–but not this time. Locals told us that people had been arriving from way downstream, their boats full of ice-boxes, and heading back with fish to sell in the gold-mining areas. Not only that, the red-tailed catfish (Phractocephalus hemioliopterus) were strangely absent. Normally a dead fish put out for lau-lau would sooner or later get the attention of these plump, big-headed beasts–but not now. This was more mysterious. It seemed to be linked with the increasingly unpredictable ups and downs of the river level.
Some fish, like salmon, freshwater eels and most sturgeon species, are well known to make long migrations between fresh and salt water. What’s less well known is that many other fish travel long distances entirely within fresh water. The record-holder, so far as anyone knows at the moment, is another Amazon catfish, the dourada (Brachyplatystoma rousseauxii). This looks just like a small piraiba (it only rarely exceeds a hundred pounds) but with a lighter, pale yellow coloration (hence the name, which means golden). Dourada spawn in the Andes, in the headwaters of the Amazon tributaries, and their larvae drift down to the Amazon delta, on Brazil’s Atlantic coast, where the juveniles feed and put on weight for a couple of years before starting their journey back upstream. All the way up, they run the gauntlet of nets and lines. But of the fish that escape, those that make it to the furthest headwaters will have completed an underwater round-trip of 7,000 miles.
In contrast to this one-time, down-then-up migration, other species swim upstream to breed every year. In the absence of a calendar, they take their cue from the state of the river. But over the last couple of decades, fishermen in many parts of the world have told me that the seasonal ups and downs of river levels have become much more unpredictable than they used to be. It’s certainly happening on the Essequibo, and some of the effects of this are visible. I’ve seen river turtle eggs, which had been buried in emerging sand beaches, washed away when the water unexpectedly rose again after a false start to the dry season. And if the turtles are confused, laying nests full of eggs that will never hatch, then who knows how this is affecting the fish? For whatever reason, it seemed that the red-tails just weren’t there. And this stoked my fear that the lau-lau, which are known to make spawning runs far upstream, had vacated this stretch of river.
I thought back to when I’d arrived, and I’d seen the river five or six feet up on what it should have been. Even so, I’d been optimistic, buoyed by memories of the Essequibo’s productivity, even when conditions weren’t quite right. Methodically I’d set about fishing the deep holes and pools where lau-lau had been encountered in the past. Nothing. More time passed, with the same lack of result. Normally on a three-week trip I have three to five
days allocated to catching the fish, but for this fish I’d always known it was going to be difficult, so I had pushed for eleven days. Even so, it was starting to look like I would run out of time.
A familiar question surfaced: stick or twist? Keep trying the spots the local fishermen recommended or try something new? I’d seen a place I liked the look of, but the locals were dismissive. It was a pool downstream of some rocks, but on a smaller scale than the more favored places, and I was told it wasn’t very deep. I decided to check it out anyway, with the sonar I’d brought along. This is something I often travel with now: it gives me a basic depth map in my notebook much more quickly than a lead weight on a line. Working systematically I found a small area that was sixty feet deep, as deep as anywhere I’d found elsewhere–not in the middle of the pool but tight in one corner. I decided to fish here for the last couple of hours before dark, and by casting to a few different spots I got a feel of what the current did beneath the surface. One cast also produced a four-pound red-tailed catfish, which seemed like a good sign. I suggested that we come back again, and fish through the night.
My feeling was based on something that I do quite often. I try to imagine that I am a fish. And the first thing to understand about fish is that they are underwater accountants, instinctive experts in the management of the most elemental currency: energy. Their governing principle is very simple: overall income has to exceed expenditure. If it doesn’t, they’re struck from the book of life, simple as that. So they don’t waste energy battling current unless there’s a very good reason. That keeps energy consumption down, but they still have to find food. The smart way to do that, in a river, is to find a place where food is delivered to them. Normally that means some kind of slack or eddy. The other big consideration is safety. Such a place is no good if it exposes the fish to potential danger. So the ideal lie provides three things: comfort, food and safety. But such special places are valuable real estate; there’s going to be competition to occupy them. And what tends to determine who wins and who loses out is that all-pervading natural law: might is right.