River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  At Lake Chamo the crocs turned out to be very real, but there were still fishermen. I should have known. Some of these were “official” fishermen; others were not. When I arrived at the lake, smoke was billowing from one of the bays. An unofficial camp had just been torched by its former occupants after they’d gotten wind that they were about to be forcibly moved. When our boat arrived at another camp that was hidden on the bay’s opposite side, a group of men with machetes and grim expressions met us. They had heard we were the fisheries people, and they weren’t going to give up this place without a fight. But when we told them that we only wanted to film, they relaxed. They let me paddle one of their flimsy balsa rafts, skirting a pod of hippos, to check their gillnets set for tilapia. I asked about Nile perch fishermen, and they pointed to an island that appeared to be uninhabited. But they advised us not to just motor over and look at the nets: “They’re watching you.”

  At the fishing cooperative in Arba Minch I spoke to the man who’d netted the heaviest Nile perch from Chamo. Its flesh weighed 231 pounds, and the head, guts, and bones would have been nearly half that, giving a total of about 340 pounds. But that was fifteen years ago. Nothing that size has been seen since. This man said that nobody catches Nile perch there on hooks, adding, “It’s impossible.”

  I also met men who had paid the price for getting too close to the lake’s wildlife. One had had his foot taken off by a croc; a hippo had horrifically gored another. Not for the first time I reflected on the reality of fishing as practiced by men like these, Labena and Altaye, and how different their reality is from mine. I tried fishing with lures, but I kept hooking nets, so I moved to nearby Lake Abaya. Again, the water was cloudy, so I caught some tilapia in the margins and set off in search of a likely spot. With a strong wind blowing down the lake, we hardly made any headway. Our iron boat crashed down on the waves, soaking us and all the kit, and I kept having visions of a weld going and sending us all to the bottom, where we would be at the mercy of crocs even more aggressive and cunning than those in Lake Chamo. On top of that, there were no underwater features. Despite the hilly landscape around the lake, the sonar revealed a bottom as flat as a pool table, a constant twenty-nine to thirty feet deep. Finally, we found a protruding rock and fished around that, but no result. It was time to move on.

  Next stop was Uganda and the northern part of Lake Victoria, which has a greater surface area than Lake Tanganyika but less water because it’s much shallower. This lake originally had no Nile perch, but they were introduced in the 1950s. Numbers then exploded, at the expense of native cichlids, and several big ones were caught, including a 191½pound fish in 1991, which held the IGFA world record for a while. But the size of fish has now declined. At the lake shore I watched a commercial fishing boat unloading and then followed the fish, packed in ice in the back of a truck, to a fish processing plant in Entebbe. Here, in conditions of hospital-like hygiene, they were packed for export. Although the tonnages going through were impressive, the size of individual fish was not. Despite a strictly enforced minimum size, most were about three pounds. They once had a fish of 339 pounds from Lake Kyoga, and other factories had seen fish to 440 pounds, but those days were gone. The biggest fish, of the thousands I saw there, was only 75 pounds.

  I was running out of places to try when I heard an extraordinary story—an extreme variation on “the one that got away.” In October 2009 an art teacher from Northern Ireland, Tim Smith, hooked a large Nile perch below Murchison Falls in Uganda. The fish had been towing Smith’s small boat up and down the river for forty-five minutes when the boat suddenly lurched, nearly knocking him into the water. The next thing he knew, Smith was staring into a crocodile’s open jaws. Mercifully, because the animal collided with the side of the boat, it missed him by about a foot. By now the fish was on the surface a few yards away, and the croc switched its attention to the easier meal, sinking its teeth into its tail and spinning it around in a death roll. But the fish kicked and the croc lost its grip, so Tim was able to tie the fish to the side of the boat and start the engine. Once well clear, he tried to revive the fish, but it had lost a lot of blood from deep puncture wounds and, eventually, now well into the night, it died. Lucky to be alive himself, Tim weighed the fish at 249 pounds, nearly 20 pounds heavier than the current IGFA record.

  Murchison Falls, on the Victoria Nile below Lake Victoria, had been on my radar for several years after some friends went there in 2000. It’s a national park, so there’s no commercial fishing, but I’d not previously heard of any real heavyweights from here. As a setting, though, it’s spectacular: the river plunges 140 feet as it squeezes through a cleft in the rocks barely 20 feet wide. In 1950 Murchison Falls was the location for a scene in King Solomon’s Mines with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger, and in 1954 Ernest Hemingway crashed a light plane nearby. I duly exchanged some e-mails with Tim, who generously gave me some up-to-date tips about the water, and I arrived feeling confident that I was as well prepared as possible.

  Other big fish, I learned, were sometimes lost. Below the falls, they would just keep going in the fast water, and in the slower reaches downstream there were beds of sharp shells, which would slice the line. Most people, I concluded, were fishing too light, although for lure fishing, it is always going to be a compromise: use heavy mono and you can hardly cast it, but switch to finer braid and you’ll get cut off on the first rock it touches.

  Sometimes the best chance that you’ll get on a water comes on your very first day. So before my first cast I prepare my tackle obsessively to make sure there are no weak links. Often I will retie a knot many times until I am satisfied that it is as near perfect as possible. I check the sharpness of the hook, touching it up with a file if necessary, and I inspect the line for nicks and other damage that could weaken it. All this is fine if I’m fishing on my own, but doing this can try the patience of a film crew. And I worry that it can reveal too much about me.

  Sometime after I left school, I became aware that I was repeating certain actions: checking that doors were locked, cookers were turned off, basins and toilet bowls were clean. Connected with these things were strange, repetitive rituals: clicking my fingers, flicking my eyes around the top corners of a room, talking to myself, counting. And I would repeat the same sequences of actions over and over, unable to finish whatever simple task it was, even though I knew that, in theory, it should have been a simple matter to control myself. In short, I thought I was going mad. But I didn’t want to tell anyone, least of all a doctor, because then I’d never get a job. This soon got to the point that these rituals were consuming hours out of each day. But, for the most part, I concealed them from those around me, making a joke if somebody spotted me repeatedly returning to rattle a door handle. Also if I wrote a letter or a card (this being pre-Internet), I would keep rereading it, over and over, to make sure I hadn’t written any obscenities or insults. So I stopped writing to people, including, in one instance, a letter I should have written after a family friend’s son had died. I felt as if my mind was possessed or, at any rate, shared, and the daily battle for control exhausted me. After fifteen years or so, I learned that my condition had a name: obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), maybe with a bit of Tourette’s syndrome thrown in. But the information now appearing didn’t offer much help other than knowing that I have plenty of company, some of it quite illustrious. (Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Billy Bob Thornton, and David Beckham are among their number, plus the fictional novelist, played by Jack Nicholson, in As Good as It Gets.) Nobody, however, really knows where it comes from, and there’s no cure for it. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that an overactive mind suddenly deprived of things to occupy and inspire it will freewheel and invent things to do. These things then become more and more ingrained the more those neural pathways are used. It’s like a stuck record, the needle following the same groove, over and over, wearing the groove deeper and deeper. To fight it, I prescribed myself some real stress. In the same way that a fever is t
he body’s kill-or-cure response to physical infection, to cook invading microbes to death, I decided to turn up the mental heat. This was the other reason I traveled alone to Zaire and the Amazon.

  So I don’t talk about obsession lightly. It’s something deep in my nature, to an extent that is pathological. But it’s also something I have harnessed. As I apply superglue to the twenty-turn Bimini twist that gives me three feet of double line above my crimped and flame-sealed fluorocarbon leader, I’m thinking fractions of percentages. And I’m sure this attention to minutiae, which most anglers would pass over, has brought me monster-sized fish that would have otherwise escaped.

  On this first day at Murchison, a little way below the falls, I started by casting a lure from the rocky banks. In one spot, very close in, between two fingers of rock, I felt a small tap and saw a boil in the water. But further casts, fanning out from my position, got no reaction. I heard our director Barny Revill saying we should move further upstream for some scenic shots of the “Devil’s Cauldron” beneath the falls. But the river was talking to me too, so I told Barny, “I’ll just have one last cast.”

  The river in front of me was a complex mix of current-lines that swung the lure first this way then that. With the rod high, I guided it again toward the two rock fingers, and when it was nearly there I had a gentle take. It felt disappointingly small, my drag registering a slow click-click-click. But then there was a sudden plunge, as if a sandbag had been dropped on the rod, and the sound rose to a whine of alarm. Looking up, I saw the line heading for a rock point downstream. If I didn’t turn the fish, it would be gone. Sprinting over the rocks after it, I struggled to exert some lateral force, and just before the point of no return, it veered into the back eddy near the bank. But once in this squashed vortex, it then sped past me going upstream until it stopped in an area of foam just down from a rapid, where I felt a sickening grate on the line. Exerting as much pressure as I dared, I felt it slowly come toward me. But in that crazy, rocky water, it still felt like too much for my thirty-pound line. Then it was on the surface, and I saw a great circular mouth. Straining to keep it clear of tumbled rocks, I guided it into a bay, where my guide Echie and I pulled it up onto land, away from any hungry crocs.

  When I first saw this fish on the surface, I thought it was around 60 or 70 pounds. But the scales went round to 112, one of the biggest Nile perch caught anywhere on a shore-fished lure. And in that wild water, with that thunderous backdrop, I couldn’t ask for a more dramatic catch.

  But I was after something much bigger. Turning to the slower reaches downriver and fishing livebaits, I geared up with 80-pound mono and a leader of tough 125-pound fluorocarbon, and although one take still resulted in a cut line, I converted two other chances to fish of 110 and 130 pounds, making an amazing hat-trick.

  Then, in a weedy bay on my last-but-one day, I hooked a fish that was instantly around a snag. As the line grated and I tried to work out what was happening, the fish surfaced at the edge of my vision, some way upstream of where the line entered the water. By now we’d drifted down to the snag, a sunken tree, but by the time I had extricated the line, the hook was no longer attached. I knew I’d lost a heavy fish, but I hadn’t seen it clearly enough to know any more than that. One of the people in the boat, however, did get a clear look. Shaking his head, he just said, “You don’t want to know.”

  SO THE QUESTION OF HOW BIG NILE PERCH GROW remains unanswered. But the mystery of “super perch,” the seventy-five-pounder that took nearly nine hours to bring to the boat, might be more solvable.

  As most anglers know, a seventy-five-pound fish doesn’t weigh seventy-five pounds in the water. Thanks to the air in its swim bladder, its weighs next to nothing. But if the swim bladder is deflated, the fish will become negatively buoyant, although it will still weigh nowhere near seventy-five pounds, because of the partial buoyancy of its tissues. The swim bladder of the seventy-five-pound Nile perch that I saw in the fish factory at Entebbe had roughly the volume of a football. This would give somewhere between five and fifteen pounds of buoyancy, which is the dead weight an angler will feel if this buoyancy is absent. And although that doesn’t sound like very much, most fishing rods won’t lift this amount. After a certain point they just keep on bending, without exerting any more lift.

  Significantly this fish was hooked in shallow water but then went deep. From my experience as a diver, I know that if I am neutrally buoyant near the surface but then kick for deeper water, my buoyancy jacket will collapse and I will keep on sinking unless I quickly squirt more air into the jacket. But a Nile perch can’t do this. Its buoyancy adjustments are very slow because gas enters and leaves its sealed swim bladder by way of the blood. And in this case it apparently didn’t make this adjustment at all. Either it consciously overruled the normal process or the lift provided by the fishing line tricked its body into thinking that neutral buoyancy had already been regained.

  Interestingly, despite the difficulty of bringing this apparent monster up, it was quite easy for the boat to tow it when we needed to keep it clear of the rocky shore. So if there had been a gently sloping beach somewhere, free from snags, we could have brought it up by pulling it into the shallows. The other recourse would have been to take hold of the twenty-five-pound main line. This would have exerted more lift than the rod and, done with care, would have brought the fish up much more quickly.

  The other monster, meanwhile—going everywhere with me, invisible under the surface—was immune to the laws of physics and logic. That monster would take far longer to beat.

  CHAPTER 9

  ALLIGATOR GAR

  Since the armor of a big gar can flatten a bullet, the talons of a hawk probably don’t feel like much more than a back rub.

  Rob Buffler and Tom Dickson, Fishing for Buffalo, 1990

  ON MAY 7, 1884, the Arkansas Gazette carried a story about a boy who went fishing at a place called Shoal Creek and had a bite he would never forget. He was sitting in a boat with friends, dangling his leg over the side, when something in the water grabbed him and pulled him overboard. His companions managed to rescue him, and he lived to tell this unlikely fisherman’s tale, though his leg was “terribly lacerated.”

  In 1932 nine-year-old Elizabeth Grainger was sitting with her feet in the edge of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana when a seven-foot-long fish seized her. Her thirteen-year-old brother ran to her rescue and managed to pull her free, but her leg was left raw and bleeding. She was rushed to the local physician, Dr. Paine, for treatment, from whose report this story survives.

  The animal that took the rap for these attacks and countless others with vague details recounted orally was the alligator gar, Atractosteus spatula, the second-largest fish in North America next to the white sturgeon. But unlike the sturgeon—and as its name implies—it is equipped with a ferocious set of teeth. Behind its head is a massive cylindrical body encased in armored scales heavier and thicker than those of any other fish. (The French explorers in the 1700s called this nearindestructible fish the poisson armé, and some say that to open one up you have to use an axe.) And right at the back, there’s a huge propulsion unit, made up of three fins grouped together: the tail and the set-back dorsal and anal fins. These give it a profile somewhat like a pike, except a medium-sized one of these could swallow any pike whole. With looks like these, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the alligator gar was a danger to humans. In 1922 the Times-Picayune of New Orleans went so far as to say that alligator gar are more dangerous than man-eating sharks, claiming that gar had killed three students wading in the Mississippi.

  I can’t remember where or when I first heard about alligator gar, but I dimly remember an old black-and-white picture of two men in a boat, one with a bent rod and the other with a drawn bow, his puny arrow aimed at a massive head rearing out of the water in front of them. The angler wore a pith helmet, which would have made it prewar. But when I started casting my net for large river species overseas, I’d seen nothing more recent. In G
ame Fish of the World, the comprehensive compendium of piscine exotica published in 1949, the alligator gar merited only passing mention. I assumed it must have been a rarity that was now extinct.

  Then in 2003 I received an e-mail from a Dutch angler, Jacques Schouten, who had visited Texas the last five summers and caught alligator gar close to two hundred pounds. This now being the age of the Internet, I went online and found some US anglers who had also caught them, and I put together a dossier of contacts and locations. At the time I was looking to do a follow-up to my Jungle Hooks series about the Amazon, and this seemed to have all the ingredients: a spectacularly fierce fish that was unknown to most people, some great locations in the backwater bayous, and plenty of biology and local lore. (A gar is clearly behind the legend of “Champ,” the Lake Champlain monster.) But this time the pitch, put together with the same producer, wasn’t successful. So the strange fish that had been shadily present in my mind, having now revealed itself to be dramatically alive, sank once more into the depths.

  The fact that alligator gar weren’t extinct, after all, was not for want of trying, on the part of Homo sapiens, to extinguish them. The stories about their attacks on humans had created an anti-gar hysteria. Many also believed that this predator was destroying game fish stocks. So in addition to large-scale commercial fishing for gar meat, self-styled vigilantes were catching gar and throwing them on the bank to rot. Then there was Col. Burr’s “electrical gar destroyer.” The colonel was the research director for the Game, Fish and Oyster Commission of Texas in the 1930s, and this contraption was an eight-by-sixteen-foot barge rigged with a 200-volt generator and trailing power lines that zapped anything it went near. On its maiden voyage, it fried seventy-five gator gar and a thousand turtles. Electrocution as a control measure caught on and probably accounted for the deaths of millions of gar, thereby helping to wipe them out from vast swathes of their original range. Historically they were found in the low-lying reaches of all rivers draining into the Gulf of Mexico, but now they’re gone from the Illinois, the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Mississippi above Memphis, and they are barely clinging on in the Arkansas River and the Florida Panhandle.