River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  For days there were no boats, but then I got a lift in a large dugout with a motor that kept breaking down. Finally, back in Bangui, an immigration officer told me, with a meaningful look, that they’d lost my passport. By chance I met somebody with influence who helped me get it back without paying the bribe, which I didn’t have the money to pay, just hours before my flight.

  Returning to England—and to a girlfriend who was keen to settle down—the time had come to do some serious soul-searching. Although I was just back from an epic, hazardous, solo journey through a place where few outsiders dare to go, she said it was now time for me to “prove myself.” Like the immigration officer, she made no direct reference to what I needed to do, but the implication was clear. So when, after a couple of months, I still hadn’t secured myself a proper job with a guaranteed, regular paycheck, she informed me that I was a “waster” and left.

  As it turned out, a few months after that I did get a job as a copywriter in an advertising agency. I stayed there for three and a half years, at first overwhelmed by my workload and then, as I found my feet, increasingly jaded and unable to take myself seriously. The future looked much more comfortable, but, boy, did it look dull. The excuse to get out came in the form of a phone call. Paul Boote had recently made a TV documentary about Himalayan mahseer and the production company was keen to capitalize on this by doing a follow-up. How about doing some recon in the Congo?

  By rights I should have been in no position even to consider this. However, working in the misinformation business had enabled me to decode the messages that others were sending in my direction. So I hadn’t “bought a house,” despite a relentless campaign, leveraged by tax breaks and huge doses of collective wishful thinking, to rebrand debt as investment. Instead, I lived in an unheated room in a downmarket housing estate, with police helicopters providing the soundtrack. However, as ample compensation for the stigma, my annual rent was the same as what many of my friends paid in loan interest every month. So instead of putting off the decision for twenty-five years, I could consider Boote’s idea for a few moments and then say, “Yes.”

  On top of that, I simply needed a break. Because of the intensity of my work, for clients that included property firms and oil companies, I’d taken only a fraction of my holiday entitlement. I had been hoping to take maybe one week of the six weeks I was owed, but my employers had recently told me that they had changed their policy on holidays and that I was no longer entitled to any of it. I was outraged. This job was eating my life, sucking my blood. And although it was true, of course, that I was getting paid for doing it, I had believed that there was more to it than that—that stuff about loyalty and being part of a team. I’d been in a similar place before when I briefly worked as a teacher and saw many of my colleagues, hardworking but undervalued people, desperate to get out of the profession but imprisoned by debt. Along with nearly everybody else, they’d been made dependent on the moneylending industry—all in the name of independence—and I dreaded the same thing happening to me. But because I had no dependents, I had more freedom than most to indulge my youthful hot-headedness. If I threw it all in—again—I would not be inflicting my quaint vision of the world on anybody else. What I was looking for, I suppose, was a way to live on my own terms, to survive without selling my soul. I’d had enough of going with the flow; it’s easy to go far if you take this direction. Kicking against the current, however, is asking to be defeated or drowned. But right then, that was what I wanted to do, with both arms out of the water, not drowning but waving—giving the soulless, sleepwalking world the finger. I would probably go under, but at least I would have tried to explore a new direction. As I held my breath and leapt, I thought: maybe there are paradoxical countercurrents, visible only to those who really look for them.

  The Congo trip was a disaster. The destination this time was the People’s Republic of Congo, the former French colony west of Zaire—and a more user-friendly part of the river. But again the water conditions were wrong: a thick brown soup, from which we failed to catch anything. Then we got stranded hundreds of miles upriver. In the end we floated down on a log raft that was steered by a small tug skippered by an incompetent drunkard. I had persuaded Martin to join us on this adventure of a lifetime, and it did indeed live up to its billing. He remembers to this day the moment a Congolese man stepped over my prone body as I lay passed out with chronic malaria. “I thought I was going to come back home without you,” he’s told me many times since. “The man just shrugged and said it was possible that you were going to die.”

  The TV documentary never happened.

  I have a theory that fishing activates some of the same neural circuits that get fired up in gamblers. Many fishermen would disagree with this, arguing that their strategies for success, although not foolproof, are scientific. Luck doesn’t come into it. Psychologists, however, might nod and talk about “reinforcement”: if rewards come along just often enough with timing that is not totally predictable, the human subject will continue to do the human equivalent of the laboratory rat pushing the food lever. But this doesn’t explain the excessive level of leverpushing in some individuals, even when the person should by now realize that the lever isn’t connected to anything. But Paul and I both have a stubborn streak. If television was a nonstarter, this ought to make for an interesting book. All we needed for an end to this story was the small matter of a fish. We now knew the right season to go, so we planned to do a return trip the next year. Martin meanwhile remembered something else he needed to be doing.

  The rematch got off to a bad start. In fishing-friendly low water the tributaries are hard to navigate because of sandbars, and doing so became even harder when an engine breakdown meant that an underpowered tug had to push our collection of barges against the current. Most of the time we moved at a slow walking pace, and sometimes we hardly made any headway at all. In some places the slightest swing of the bow would have swept us around and wedged us immovably in the middle of nowhere. We reached our destination after two weeks, cooking on the tarpaulin-sheltered deck and sleeping in confined bunks below. After this, things improved once we had regained some physical and mental energy. We set up base in a riverside village, presided over by a soft-spoken chief, and started to fish. The villagers told us that this was the right time and place for mbenga. But the livebaits that we laboriously caught and fished under floats in pockets of turning water failed to attract any interest, and likewise for the artificials that flashed and vibrated enticingly. How could such a savage predator be so finicky? We’d written off the Belgian doctor, whose notes had formed the basis of the old book chapter, as an old duffer whose patchy results would be knocked into a cocked hat by modern-day equipment and know-how. But it looked like he was right about goliath’s elusiveness. We spoke to an old fisherman who used to catch them on a handline, and he told us to fish lumps of dead fish on the bottom—not dead fish, but pieces of fish meat. Doubting this would tempt a mid-water hunter, we nevertheless tried it, as we’d drawn a blank with everything else.

  We set up at the downstream end of a sandbar, where the channel swept from one side of the river to the other. Despite heavy weights, the current carried our baits far downstream and deposited them on the shoulder of deep water. Although the spot looked “fishy,” I wasn’t really expecting anything, so I was taken by surprise when my reel screamed into life. I engaged the drag and, mindful that there was a lot of stretchy line out, sprinted up the scorching sand while sweeping the rod over my head. Moments later a snarling head shattered the surface, cloaked in spray, while I kept running to straighten the belly in the line. Then the fish was dragging me back, pulling in the current like a kite in a gale as I fought to get line back on the reel. By some miracle, despite further jaw-clacking jumps, the enraged animal stayed attached, right up to the point when Paul slipped the gaff into its chin and pulled it onto the sand.

  Lying before us, the fish was a bright bar of engraved silver, terminating in a splash of crimson on the
lower lobe of its flaglike tail. Its other fins, all standing proud and curved at the leading edge, were like scythes. Everything about it told of slicing through water—and through flesh. After all, there was just no ignoring those teeth, so diabolical and machinelike. It almost didn’t seem real—a creature too impossible even to make up. But here it was, the words of Dr. Gillet made flesh. And if I’d ever been in any doubt about the words of Leander J. McCormick, Gillet’s awe-struck translator and editor, then I wasn’t anymore. McCormick had declared, on the basis of what he’d read, “that a large Goliath is by all odds the most difficult fresh water fish to hook and land.” This 38½-pounder had taken three expeditions and six years to catch.

  We returned to England and spent the next year writing a book about it, through which this incredible fish captured the imagination of a whole new generation of anglers. But I was left with a niggle of dissatisfaction, a feeling of unfinished business. My goliath, although impressive, was only medium-sized. Part of me never wanted to set foot in the Congo again, but another part knew I had to. Meanwhile, the person in the mirror was getting older, and I knew a time would come when I would be physically and mentally past it. Maybe life was too short for this particular dream.

  The opportunity to return to the Congo came with the second series of River Monsters. There’s only a short list of candidate species out there, so it was inevitable that goliath would come up for consideration. To show a big one on TV would be an incredible coup, but set against that was the high likelihood of failure. Whereas I can survive next to a river at almost zero cost and stay as long as I like, the daily cost of putting a film crew in the field, plus kit, is very high. To make it possible at all, we had to introduce some economies of scale by shooting a second film in the Congo about its catfish. But we’d still at most only have three weeks, including traveling and all background filming, to catch a goliath.

  We arrived in Brazzaville in August 2009, planning to get provisions and head straight upriver. I’d done my best to keep up with developments in central Africa in the two decades since I’d last been here, but all of it seemed overwhelming, even by this region’s excessive standards. In the mid-1990s the Rwandan conflict spilled over into eastern Zaire, along with the armies of seven African countries, all helping themselves, on the side, to a slice of Zaire’s mineral wealth. This ultimately led to the downfall of Mobutu, who was ousted in 1997 and died in exile shortly thereafter. But the country, now rechristened the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), remains in conflict, with the death toll from this recent civil war standing at over four million.

  Civil war had also flared in Congo-Brazzaville with the appearance of the “ninja” rebels in 1997. Now the city was even more decayed than I remembered it. Returning with a film crew, I wondered if we’d be staying in the Mbamou Palace hotel, where visiting businessmen used to hole up, but this was now a shot-up shell that was in a state of stalled reconstruction. Elsewhere the mood seemed less easygoing and more desperate. On top of that, despite having secured over a period of months the necessary paperwork for an immediate start, we now needed more permits. Day after day our series producer camped in a succession of offices, constantly being told “tomorrow” while the rest of us lost the will to live. Getting a boat was also proving to be nearly impossible. By the time we were on the river we’d lost a whole week, one-fifth of our total time for two films.

  We arrived at the sand beach in front of the village after traveling half the night. On the way, we had negotiated treacherous rocky whirlpools in the dark, all the while cursing the final delay that had kept us, plus food and gear, waiting at the riverside for half a day. But to be away from the city was a huge relief, and we now had only the river and fish to contend with. We’d selected the narrow couloir (corridor) region of the river to fish, although “narrow” in the context of the Congo means three-quarters of a mile wide. This runs between hilly banks for about 150 miles above Brazzaville, and because the river above, which braids around countless islands, is up to 11 miles across, it acts like a funnel, its flow fast and powerful. At intervals along its banks are rocky bluffs, and as the flow rips past these, it creates diagonal furls of turbulence, enclosing wedges of countercurrent. The name for such a place is a bweta, and these are said to be the home of sirens and spirits. Fishermen also say they are where you’ll find mbenga on the shifting shear-line between slack and current, ready to hit anything that is struggling in the tumbling water. Few locals fish for goliath, but the preferred technique used to be a short line under a large float, held in place by thin cord running to the bank, which would snap when the bait was hit, after which the fisherman would pursue the float in his canoe. There were three or four such back eddies in striking distance of our camp. But the problem, as usual, was getting bait. The village’s few fishermen caught very little in their nets, so we ended up buying fish, in ones and twos, from fishermen from across the river in the DRC.

  I’d been told the best bait was a live kamba or machoiron catfish of about a pound, fished a few feet under the surface. Dead, unmoving fish are much less effective, although I have caught arapaima in the Amazon on dead fish suspended underneath a float when surface waves sometimes give the bait some movement. Back home, where there’s a more sentimental attitude toward fish—apart from the bluefin tuna, monkfish, and Chilean sea bass that we happily exterminate to tickle our palates, along with the fish of all species that our waste products poison—the use of live fish as bait can be a contentious subject. The practice is one that I don’t feel totally comfortable with, but sometimes it’s possible to do it in a way that allows the baitfish to be released if it isn’t taken, little the worse for wear—especially if it’s a hardy species like a catfish.

  On my first fishing day I started in the turning water at the mouth of a sidestream, but the place didn’t live up to its promise. We continued down to a bweta, where we maneuvered the boat underneath towering rock. Once we’d settled on our mooring rope, I nicked a treble hook just under a machoiron’s dorsal fin and swung it underarm into the water at my feet, into the slow edge of the countercurrent. Scarcely breathing, I watched my orange-tipped float sidle upriver toward the apex of the slack, a textbook holt for an ambush predator. As it approached, the float started to dance and spin in the tongues of current and then it shot off toward mid-river as the main flow caught it. Holding the rod high and alternately checking and loosing the line, I was able to guide it, after a fashion, along the line of the diagonal furl, at times getting it to pause in a temporary slack before it got swept further out. Finally, with perhaps eighty yards of line out, the float, by now a distant dot, swung back toward me, entering the gyre that would bring it back to my feet. Searching such an area of good water in this way was greatly satisfying, but with each revolution—following a subtly different path, a different radius, a different depth—I could feel my belief uncoil. By experimenting with rod position and length of line, I found I could also hold the bait static in a small area, usually one of the chain of whorls along the outer edge of the slack. But there was still no interest. I drew it in once more, into the current-line that would take it again to the apex, and this time the float trotted closer to the bank, curving out of sight behind a large boulder. I let it go for a few feet, but the braided line was now too close to the rock, so I engaged the reel and raised the rod to bring the float back into view. As I did so, I felt a wrench on the line, which slammed the rod down. Five seconds later the line fell slack.

  The last two inches of wire, above the dead, tooth-punctured catfish, came back twisted like curly hair, and for a foot above that the line was filmed with thick slime. My last time here, nearly two decades before, I’d fished with forty-pound monofilament, which has a degree of elasticity. Now I was using the latest zero-stretch braid, virtually unbreakable at two hundred–pounds breaking strain (unless it rubs a rock edge) to transmit all the strike force to the bony jaw, but the fish had treated even that with utter contempt. When I showed the evidence of this brief
est encounter to the villagers, they shook their heads. “You should put three of those hooks in the fish,” they said. “And others below it, and above it. Maybe ten of them.” In other words, if the hook wasn’t going to hold in the mouth, they were suggesting that I snag it, either in the back with the trebles above the bait, which would trail behind its head as it ran, or in the gill plate with the loose trebles below, which might wrap around it when it jumped. They couldn’t understand when I said I didn’t want to do this. Catching the fish fairly was important to me, and I wanted to return it unharmed. I was also dubious about festooning the bait with too many hooks. Doing so would affect the liveliness of the bait, and it would also mean that the force of the strike was divided between several hook points—the bed of nails effect. I wondered if there was any rig that would increase my chances or whether results would always be random.

  The next day we went to a tourbillon upstream. We had to fiddle with the anchor a lot before the boat settled into a good position, from which I managed to float the bait out to a good spot: sixty yards away and just off the diagonal line of turbulence. To think of rivers as unidirectional is common, but in the big picture there are always these pockets where something else is happening. Usually the surface gives a clue to underwater forces combining and canceling. Here a shifting furl of spiky waves was bordered, along its downstream edge, by areas of smooth upwelling. I was fishing a two-pound machoiron with one treble hook nicked through the back and another two suspended from cable ties, one under the belly and the other under the tail, like a lure.

  At around midday, simultaneously the float vanished and the ratchet screamed. I pushed the drag lever to the strike position and lurched forward as the rod folded over, but there was no reduction in the fish’s velocity. I pushed the lever nearly to its limit, and as my back doubled over and my legs tensed against the gunwales, the rod was almost torn from my grip. At least there was no way the hooks could fail to set, given this amount of force. So when the line suddenly went slack, I assumed the fish was running toward me, and wound frantically to regain contact. But after a few seconds I knew. All I brought back was half a bait, torn and punctured. The score was two-nil, to the fish.