The trouble is, if you scale down then you might not get that big fish that you’re after. “I tend to gear up for the biggest fish I’m likely to find, which can mean that if you get a medium size one, you just sort of pull it in unceremoniously. So be inventive, try things, and if something doesn’t work, try something else.” That is quite important, you don’t just write it off as a failure – it’s actually contributed to the sum of your knowledge about fish. That might result in you catching a fish, and it might not, but even if it doesn’t, you’ve learned something. As I said, fishing can be about experimentation, so in a sense, it almost follows the scientific method – you have a hypothesis that there is a fish in a certain place, and you test that by putting a certain food item there and leaving it. Fish, like people, are lazy, and even though they might normally chase something around to catch it, if you put something in front of it that actually involves less work, they’ll go for that. Most of the fish that I’m after are predators, so if you just put a big lump of bloody flesh down there, they’ll probably go for that. “The right bait can take a little bit of experimentation. Fishing is often about putting the right bait in the right place at the right time, so once you’ve got the right place, you’ve really narrowed it down.” So if you think of it in those terms, and you think about where the fish is going to feel safe or find food, then you now know where the fish are. I know that sounds sort of Zen – fish have tiny little brains, their lives don’t involve a great deal of philosophy or anything like that – but for them, it’s really how to stay safe, and how to find something to eat, and occasionally how to mate. “Something that I try to do is put myself in the mind of the fish. Don’t try this at home! Er…unless you live in the Amazon, in which case, be our guest. With the fifth season of River Monsters airing on Animal Planet right now, we asked monster-catcher-in-chief Jeremy Wade to give us a guide to catching ourselves a river monster.
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