River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  Vinay suggested I put out a super-strength handline, baited with singed goat meat. But there was no time to mount a proper campaign, beyond trying to catch a smaller goonch from elsewhere, to show what the alleged culprit looks like. This turned out to be a mission in itself, but the sixty-pounder I caught was the first specimen of this species ever to be seen on TV. The main story, however, was filed under “unfinished business.”

  And that’s where it might have stayed if another friend of mine hadn’t watched the series a couple of years later. Wildlife filmmaker Lucy d’Auvergne had just finished a two-year stint filming chimpanzees in Tanzania, and she saw the story as being of interest to a much wider audience. She put together a detailed proposal and cut a five-minute taster DVD and took this to Harry Marshall, boss of Icon Films in Bristol, the UK’s main center of wildlife filmmaking. Harry carefully placed this bait and then waited, a process that took several months, while interested parties circled, until Animal Planet decided to give us the go-ahead.

  One of our goals was to get the first underwater footage of goonch. But going underwater into the goonch’s environment was a daunting prospect. Because nobody had done it before, there was no telling how one of these supersize predators might react to a person up close. To give ourselves the best chance of the footage we needed, we enlisted veteran underwater cameraman Rick Rosenthal, whose interest we managed to pique. Rick is a passionate fish conservationist, whose work is all about getting close to the ocean’s largest and rarest creatures and showing their intimate lives to those of us who cannot go where he goes. Waiting on the edge of a bait ball, while marlin spear and slash just feet away, is all in a day’s work for Rick, and having such experience in our team was an enormous boon. Part of the key to Rick’s success over the years is that, where possible, he doesn’t use air tanks and all the other scuba paraphernalia. His normal dive kit is a mask and snorkel—and one breath of air. And this was all we were going to use in India. Scuba diving, in contrast, would have been a logistical nightmare, requiring us to drag a compressor, tanks, and other bulky gear into the mountains. The size of the team and cost would have multiplied too. All that to turn ourselves into large underwater objects blowing off clouds of noisy bubbles, which would very likely send all other underwater life heading for the horizon.

  Although nervous about this mission, I was not a complete novice underwater, having learned to scuba dive in British coastal waters in the early 1990s. I took it up out of a desire to see my imagined landscapes for real. But diving in rivers and lakes held no attraction for other divers, who saw this as looking for “brown fish in brown water.” So I did what they did, and I clocked up the hours sucking bottled air on reefs and wrecks. But free-diving, or breath-hold diving, beyond wandering around on the surface with a snorkel and the odd short duck-dive, was totally new for me. So before going to India I took a course at the British navy’s Submarine Escape Training Tower (SETT) at Gosport near Southampton.

  Free-diving is as much a mental discipline as it is a physical one. Borrowing much from yoga, it is anything but a macho activity. A relaxed body and mind means slower oxygen consumption and more time until you need to breathe. In the weeks before the course I’d done exercises to stretch and loosen my ribcage and abdominal muscles along with breathing routines to increase my tolerance to carbon dioxide build-up in the lungs, the trigger that makes you involuntarily inhale well before you’ve exhausted available oxygen. Lying on my back, I could empty my mind and let time slowly pass, not wanting to hurry it along, familiar now with the spasms that start to ripple through the diaphragm, which I gently ride, aware but detached as I slowly check my watch, now nearing the end of its second, third, or even fourth revolution. But in water the body is more active, as is the mind, which cuts the breath-hold time. In the tank I managed to pull myself feet-first down a rope to thirty feet, pushing tiny squirts of precious air through my Eustachian tubes to relieve the pressure on my eardrums, and puffing through my nose to ease the squeeze on my low-volume mask. But for some reason I couldn’t descend head-first. My ears, always a bit “slow,” refused to equalize in this position, probably a result of nervous tension constricting the tubes. At ten feet, the pain would stop me going any further, which was immensely frustrating, as I had plenty of air left. My pulse was insistent and loud, and the more I tried to shut it out, the more it hammered for attention. Maybe part of my mind was thinking ahead to cold gloomy water and hidden monsters in caves.

  Then we were in India, where news came from our intended location, Corbett National Park (named after the celebrated hunter, conservationist and author, Jim Corbett), that suddenly made our task seem near-impossible. We would not, after all, be allowed to get in any of the pools along the park’s stretch of the West Ramganga River because of the risk from mugger crocodiles. We would have to find somewhere else—where the goonch were unprotected and, therefore, much more scarce and wary. The Kali was a nonstarter because it was too dangerous—not only because of the possible presence of a man-eating specimen but also the strong currents and poor visibility, which, according to latest intelligence, was down to zero now following rain.

  So we settled on a pool further up the Ramganga, some distance from Corbett Park, where the fish have a degree of protection because of a temple beside the water. But even this doesn’t deter the really determined poachers. A couple of years before, Vinay had found a huge goonch here that had been killed by electro-fishing, Indian style. This involves hooking cables up to the power lines that stretch between wooden poles along the valley and then carefully dipping the other ends in the water, thereby also causing the lights to dim in nearby Bhikya Sein. Having removed the wires, the poacher then scoops the dead and dying fish from the surface. At seven feet, six inches to the fork of the tail, and possibly weighing over three hundred pounds, the monster goonch would have been impossible to carry; and even cutting it into pieces might not have been worth the effort, as goonch aren’t considered good to eat. (A poacher who sold pieces of goonch saying it was mahseer was later beaten up for his trouble.) More likely, though, the poachers didn’t see it. Unlike other fish, catfish aren’t weightless in water but rather slightly more dense, thanks to heavy bones in the head and a small swim bladder. So the corpse would have slowly trundled along the bottom, between the cliff that forms the pool’s left bank and the boulder beach opposite, to the shallows at the bottom end, where Vinay’s friends found it.

  But I knew monstrous fish were still there. I had hooked one when filming with Gavin but lost it when it sliced my ninety-pound nylon on a rock. In a state of deepening despair, I then fished on for days and nights without a touch—the pool had gone dead. This often happens with fish, but in this case an overzealous assistant didn’t help the situation. One evening he spotted two young lads who had come down to the river from somewhere high above in the valley. They were deploying a loop line, a length of cord with monofilament nooses every few inches, along the base of the cliff. Loop lines are usually strung across flowing shallows, where they can be surprisingly effective. A fish, moving upstream, finds its head inside a noose and panics, tightening the nylon between its gills and pectoral fins. And the more it struggles the tighter the line holds it. Strung along the cliff base, a few feet under water, the loop line would intercept the small species that suck algae from the rock, but it is a low-impact method that just provides occasional fish for the fishermen themselves. Granted, the boys’ line could have been a hazard if I hooked a fish, but goonch tend to fight on the bottom and their line was at mid-water, so I was prepared to live and let live. But before I knew it, the lads had been sent packing by a fellow who is normally charming but who, so the story goes, took an iron bar to the last person who crossed him, breaking both his legs.

  The incident left me with a nasty taste in my mouth, but soon after dark, when I heard the explosion of a large predatory fish breaking the surface, my thoughts turned to other things. The sound of the fish, in the nighttime stillness, was immense, li
ke a huge boulder falling in the water. Then it happened again, much closer, and then again. Then we were yelling at one another to get the hell away from the water and hurling impotent obscenities at the unseen figures high above. This was the low point of the entire trip. I consoled myself with the thought that the lost fish was “one of those things,” something I could have done nothing about even though a camera light had been blinding me at the time, obscuring the direction of the line. But later I realized I was kidding myself. If, after hooking the fish, I had moved out of the corner where I was fishing, I would have been in a strategically stronger position. The fish escaped by swimming into a gully in the cliff, but if I had repositioned myself, this wouldn’t have taken the line round a corner and I could have pulled it straight out. This was a painful relearning of a basic lesson. Before you fish, you must have a plan that takes account of all eventualities. Not until our postmonsoon return was I able to make some amends. The sixty-pounder I caught was an impressive fish, but nowhere near the size of the lost monster.

  Back at the pool now, these memories returned. Two boys fishing with a thick washing line from a big rock upstream looked on as Rick and I peered down into the water, where it pushed into the pool and then kicked ninety degrees on impact with the cliff. I had promised him clear water, but Rick was not impressed. We could see the bottom near the side, where baby mahseer darted into an eddy, but Rick reckoned horizontal visibility would be only six feet. As we pulled on our wetsuits I tried to still my nerves. Rick and I had free-dove a cold, murky English lake before coming here, but I felt unprepared for this. Without Rick, I wouldn’t have dreamed of venturing into that fearful underwater landscape, but his matter-of-fact approach was reassuring.

  As he rubbed liquid soap onto the inside of his mask and rinsed it with water, he said, “What I tell everyone to remember is this: when you find yourself wanting to breathe, you’ve still got plenty of oxygen left.” With that, he took hold of his camera housing and pushed out into the current. The sun was high, but soon it would swing behind the cliff and plunge the water at its base into gloom. There was nothing to do but follow.

  I tried to relax my body and let the water take me. With four pounds of lead on my quick-release weight belt to counteract the lift of my thin wetsuit, my buoyancy felt about right. I dipped my head under and felt the water on my face, the one part of me that wasn’t enclosed in neoprene. Looking down, I could see my gloved hand, but beyond that, a cloudy green atmosphere thickened to obscure everything else. I lifted back up and saw the cliff approaching fast. Okay, what next? Breathing. Slow and unforced, the rubber weight belt yielding as I took air deep into my abdomen. And long, slow exhalations to quiet the pulse. In the training tank I had closed my eyes and shut off my mind, leaving just a slender sensory thread connected to the outside world. But here I needed to stay aware. The current was now bumping me against rock. Further along I saw Rick’s fins flip up and sink from sight as he tucked and duck-dived. Now in his sixties, he told me he didn’t have the lung capacity that he had as a young man, but he still seemed underwater for an age. I thought about loop lines and anglers’ lines snagged on the rocks down there, some with hooks. We both had knives strapped to our ankles, but we didn’t have the luxury of air tanks—only our internal supply, which would last one or two minutes at most. So we had to watch out for each other, diving alternately. This was hugely reassuring when it was my turn to descend, but it was a huge responsibility when I was the one on the surface.

  An object with a Perspex dome on the front broke the surface, followed by a camo-patterned wetsuit and a jet of water from a snorkel. Rick hadn’t seen anything. I squeezed the air from my lungs and pulled in a full fresh charge, my diaphragm working like a piston, then I pinched my nose, popped my ears, pulled my body into a tuck, and followed my outstretched arms downward. Below me was opaque gloom, but the cliff sliding past at my side was a reassuring presence. My mind flashed back to a sea cliff I dove off Oban, western Scotland, when I lost contact with this reference surface and found myself with equal darkness all around. For a few brief moments I had no sense of which way was up and which was down until I checked the direction of my bubbles. But here I was producing no bubbles. My weight belt had slackened around my middle, now compressed by the weight of water, and I had equalized my ears once more as I finned further down the smooth, sculpted rock. And then, sooner than expected, I saw the bottom, a field of sand and scattered boulders that swept in from a dim horizon to meet the base of the cliff. I pulled myself into an upright position and looked around me. The landscape was cleaner than expected, the loose boulders smaller. I couldn’t see any fish, but I couldn’t explore further because I had to get back up. I kicked and watched the rock flash past, getting brighter as I neared the liquid ceiling above.

  Although I was starting to feel more comfortable underwater, managing longer submersions, and starting to spot sucker-mouthed carp swimming close to the rock in places where a strategically placed loop line could have snared them, the low visibility was a problem. Diving here was like blundering around with a small candle in a dark room. We were only likely to see a goonch if we were right on top of it, whereupon mutual shock would cause it to bolt. Nevertheless, after a half-dozen more dives, Rick surfaced with a whoop: “I’ve just filmed my first goonch!” But it wasn’t a close view, just a shape that disappeared in a cloud of sand. A little while later I was sliding head-first down a forty-five-degree slope toward a lip where the rock fell vertically away, and there, in the overhang under the lip, was an open-sided tunnel with a goonch wedged inside: four or five feet long and inches from my face. I slammed on the brakes by grabbing the rock above and reversed away, and then I explained to Rick where it was. But despite descending from the correct spot, he couldn’t find its hideout, and nor could I when I went back down. The landscape we were exploring was a complex abstract sculpture whose features seemed to rearrange themselves when we weren’t looking. And with such a short horizon, navigating by following one remembered landmark to another was nearly impossible. A few dives later, though, I was drifting along the excavated angle between sand and rock when something made me stop. I slowly floated up and found myself face to face with the same fish—although a moment later, following a dull thump, there was only a blur of water filling the space it had occupied.

  We needed to review our tactics. Perhaps it was time to deploy the ROV. The Remote Operated Vehicle was a minisubmarine we’d brought along inside a suitcase-sized flight case with another watertight case housing the control panel and the screen that displayed the view from the remote camera. Pictures were relayed back through a neutrally buoyant quarter-inch cable, by which the craft was also controlled electronically. It reminded me of Thunderbird 2 from the TV show Thunderbirds, which I used to watch as a kid. A scale-model toy was something I had desperately coveted, but Santa Claus had only considered me well behaved enough to deserve mints and tangerines. Okay, this was forty years late, but I was going to be flying this ship on a mission every bit as exciting as those piloted by Virgil Tracy.

  We fired up the small generator and launched the ROV halfway down the pool, from the boulder beach across from the cliff. Although the current was scarcely visible here, it was still powerful enough to put a bow in the tether. We compensated for this by swimming it across to the cliff then turning its head up-current, exactly like a fish. With the current slower here, I was able to hold position and then maneuver quite precisely, resting the ROV on sloping ledges and lightly bumping it over and around rocks on its stealthy search upstream. Immediately we were seeing a lot more fish, particularly mahseer, swimming up and down underneath the rock overhangs. And we were getting much closer, without seeming to spook them. I dimmed the lights and periodically flicked to the rear black-and-white camera. I still saw nothing large anywhere. The rock was sculpted into organic shapes, like a living thing turned to stone, portions of which would loom enigmatically, fill the screen, then vanish. Then there was something a slightly dif
ferent color, more gray than brown, outlined against the cloudy water. Yes! It was the flank of a goonch—I could see the mottled bands now. I eased the ROV back a bit, bumped it down to rest on the rock, turned a fraction to the right and there was its head. We got the DV tape in the recording deck spooling as I then edged closer. The fish reacted as if it was quite accustomed to being visited by black-and-yellow minisubmersibles bedecked with lights. Who knows what was going through its mind? Maybe it just saw the ROV as a weird looking fish, but one that was no threat because it was a lot smaller. Or maybe the goonch hadn’t registered it at all. Some fish occasionally become torpid, a state akin to sleeping, and this one was resting on its belly, a bit like some sharks do. Or maybe it had been taken by surprise and was puzzled—in a fishy, worried way—and was pretending to be a rock. I managed to look at it for a good five minutes. Only when I eased forward to nudge it gently did it move away and disappear. Again I put this fish at four or five feet long. We had our goonch footage, but nothing yet that had us quaking in our boots.

  The next day we went to another pool a few miles upstream. From a suspension bridge above, we looked down on a shoal of big mahseer, effortlessly cruising in midstream. That looked like a good sign. Again, there was an underwater cliff with lots of hiding places—perfect goonch habitat—but we dove the whole length of the pool without seeing a single one. The spookiest sight was a dead carp snared in a torn net fragment underneath a tangle of sunken tree roots. However, the absence of goonch was most odd, particularly given the presence of the mahseer overhead, which seemed to rule out the cause simply being poachers.