by Jeremy Wade
It takes me several seconds to register what has happened. The end of the rod broke, and the resultant jar on the line broke that too: the final punishment for using a rod that was too long. Despite its formidable backbone, my “high sticking” bent its tip too sharply. And with these fish, I now realize, there is no room for error. Something else seemed to go at that moment too, but for now, I just stare at the broken rod, refusing to believe that all that time and suffering were for nothing. We never saw the rest of the fish, but everyone knows it was huge.
The next day, I had another bait taken, but we failed to hook up. The bait came back with a fine honeycomb pattern pressed into its rear half, the characteristic signature of stingray teeth—but also the sign of a wary fish. Then later I hooked something, which over the course of an hour pulled the boat half a mile against the tide. At one point the fish rose thirty yards from the boat and boiled at the surface, but it was not capitulating—just coming up to check us out. This time there were no slips at the boat. With the net pulled around it, cradling it outside the gunwale, the team carefully bound the barb to its tail with a rag, and then we slowly returned to the landing stage where the scientists were waiting. It was a huge female, over six feet across, but with the memory of the lost fish still raw, I was not as jubilant as I might otherwise have been. (The bigger rays are invariably females, the smaller males being easily identifiable by their paired claspers near the root of the tail.)
The next day I brought in another, this one measuring six feet, three inches across. As the team supported it in the shallows, clipping a small notch of skin for DNA analysis and scraping a blob of black mucus from the base of the eight-inch spine for the toxicology lab, we were suddenly aware that there was another stingray in the net, and then another. This female had just given birth, and unlike my first stingray in the Amazon, these newborns were at full term, nearly eighteen inches across, with no yolk sac and fully developed barbs. Before our eyes, these miniature weapons started to lose the protective capsule that prevents internal damage to the mother. Although they were babies, we could see that nothing was going to be bothering them in the river. And it occurred to me that this could be the reason for the mother’s immense size: simply to be large enough to harbor such large young.
As we released the mother ship, and watched the tip of her long, whiplike tail disappear, I reflected on the fact that this fish, which Rick estimated at over 350 pounds, came to the boat in just twenty minutes. And I couldn’t help wondering again how big the unseen fish had been.
But now was the time to pursue another question: is this giant a true freshwater species? Although a salinity meter had shown that the water here is fresh when the tide is running out, all the recent, confirmed captures have been in the tidal zone of the Maeklong and the last few miles of the strong-flowing Ban Pakong. However, we had heard reports of other captures from locations well inland.
One fisherman told me of a ray accidentally enclosed in a net 100 miles up the Ban Pakong. Something had bumped one of his companions in the stomach, and then they saw it rise in the water before it slid underneath and away. He put it at over 200 pounds. Another man showed me the picture, and tail, of a fish he caught 150 miles up the Chao Phraya at Nakhon Sawan in December 2008. After picking up a live carp on a thirty-hook longline, it resisted the efforts of ten men for four hours, dragging their boat for more than a mile. As I listened to the story, someone showed me mobile phone footage of the fish with two men standing on its back. It certainly looked very big, but was it really 704 pounds, which they said was its weight at the market? It was impossible to say.
Then I traveled to the Mekong, very close to where I’d been arrested. Here fisherman Boon Song told me that a big stingray, six feet across, had torn his net ten years before. When I showed him a picture of the Nakon Sawan fish, he said it was the same fish—and the same size. If this report is true, that’s a stingray nearly a thousand miles from the South China Sea. Another fish was reported in July 2008 from the Mun River, a tributary joining the Mekong some five hundred miles inland. This one measured over six feet across and was weighed, in pieces at the market, at 411 pounds.
But the reports of these fish growing to over one thousand pounds remain unproven, so the jury is still out on the world’s biggest freshwater fish. In some ways this is an academic question, but it does have wrapped inside it the mysteries of all the world’s great river fish, so it’s worth asking. Most people would discount beluga and white sturgeon, both recorded at well over one thousand pounds, on the grounds that they are not (normally) full-time river residents. After them comes a disparate shoal of true freshwater species that, in all likelihood, exceed five hundred pounds (arapaima, piraiba, and Mekong giant catfish, although only the last has the paperwork to prove it) and some others that might (Nile perch, alligator gar, wels catfish, Siamese carp [Catlocarpio siamensis], dog-eating catfish [Pangasius sanitwongsei], and goonch). But which of these has—or had—the biggest specimen at any time, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, where the “freshwater” whipray fits into the picture is also unclear, as it is most commonly found in tidal, brackish water and could probably survive in salt water (although, so far, no one has found it there). Unlike Amazon rays, the Thai whipray appears to be still making the transition to fresh water.
And now this gray area has another interloper. One year after my return to Thailand, I heard of another giant river ray whose freshwater credentials are in no doubt. And I started making plans to see if I could catch one of these monsters myself.
THE THAIS SOMETIMES CALL THE STINGRAY pla rahu, the eclipse fish, as its shape resembles the dark disc that covers the sun and turns day into night. Eclipses are universally feared, and thus, by association, the stingray is believed to be a bringer of bad luck—and not just in the obvious, cause-and-effect way, when an unlucky victim encounters its spine.
Sometime after the giant Himantura chaophraya snapped my rod and escaped, I noticed a hollow in my upper right arm, as if a golf ball–sized piece of muscle had wasted away. On my return home, I showed it to my doctor, who told me that one of the two tendons anchoring the top of my biceps had broken. He referred me to a specialist and said I would likely need to cancel my next film trip, for which all permits had been organized and all kit and crew booked, because I’d need urgent surgery followed by six weeks’ convalescence. If we waited too long to operate, according to one website, my arm would lose 30 to 50 percent of its strength.
The news from the specialist was mixed. If I’d been an athlete in my twenties, they would have opened up my arm and tried to re-anchor the tendon. But in my case, doing that wasn’t worth it. The good news was that the loss of strength is only 5 to 7 percent, which I can live with. Also, with no tendon, there was now no pain—which was a relief of sorts, as my arm had been aching for several months beforehand. So although I can’t be certain that that was the moment when it happened, I now have a hole in my arm, rather like one of the depressions that stingrays excavate in the Amazon shallows, as a permanent reminder of the giant Thai whipray that I lost. And although the two events have become linked in my mind, I don’t blame the ray or subscribe to the belief that it is a bringer of bad luck. Nevertheless, when the possibility of a return match with another giant river stingray came up, my interest was tempered by trepidation.
The short-tailed river ray, Potamotrygon brachyura, lives in the Paraná-Paraguay River south of the Amazon. According to the FishBase website, the species was described back in 1880. But the site gives a maximum size of only three feet and describes it as “harmless.” This is at odds with what I was now hearing: stories of a huge, club-tailed beast that terrifies both mixed-race Argentineans and indigenous Guaraní. Although it is short in relation to its body, the ray’s tail is covered in thorny spines, which can rip flesh to the bone. Near the tip are one or two barbed prongs, four inches long, which inject flesh-rotting venom. Human deaths, I was told, include a fifteen-year-old Guaraní girl stabbed in the abdomen and a boy
pierced in the thigh. Fishermen would rather cut their lines than go near it. As for its size, I was told of a 480-pounder caught in 2008 after a three-hour fight, and one weighing 572 pounds that was caught in 2002. The maximum weight could exceed 600 pounds.
I arrived in the town of Bella Vista after an overnight bus journey north from Buenos Aires through endless flat scrub. The river was far larger than I expected, splitting into multiple channels that extended its width to four miles. But the profusion of low islands meant plenty of promising-looking spots: eddies and slacks where channels merged as well as deep holes where lakes and swamps drained back into the river. I wasn’t going to take any chances with these fish, so I’d set up a 5½-foot shark rod coupled with thick 150-pound mono and a 7-foot coated wire leader. To get the line out, I clipped it to a plastic water bottle, using strong elastic bands, and then floated it down the current before jerking it free. It worked perfectly, apart from one thing: sometimes the bottle would dip and bob before I released the line, a sign that the giant gold-colored piranhas, known as palometa, that infest these waters had eaten the bait. Other times dorado (Salminus brasiliensis), a beautiful, leaping gamefish that resembles a gilded salmon—but in this context, a “nuisance” species—would take it. I clearly needed to change my approach, to get the bait down quickly into the realm of the bottom-feeders.
But even after I switched to an outfit that I could cast (a seven-foot rod with two hundred–pound braid and a shorter leader), the piranhas continued to find the bait, even after dark. Night also brought striped catfish, known here as surubi. Although I’ve handled scores of these, I was holding a small one up for the camera when it kicked and stuck its pectoral spine into the back of my left hand. The pain was excruciating, and I swore and swore. But it was a useful reminder: I could afford no such lapse of concentration when the stingray came along.
I also saw the scars, on feet and ankles. One young fisherman, Tingo, has been stung ten times. He says the pain is like holding your foot in a fire. One encounter was clearly with a very big fish: when he jumped back after being hit, he stepped on another part of its body and got hit again. Later, when he hooked a 473-pounder on a line he had put out for surubi, he shot it three times with a 9mm handgun before landing it. Tingo treated the wounds himself with hot sand. At the town hospital, they first inject local anesthetic and scrub the wound to remove dirt and dead tissue. Then they bathe it in hot water, which breaks down the venom. An older fisherman, Peto, who didn’t treat a wound, says it didn’t fully heal for six years. The scar, on his left ankle, feels hard to the touch and remains numb to this day. The worst-case scenario, however, if the necrosis sets in, is gangrene. At this stage, amputation may be the only way to save the victim’s life.
This all helped to explain the small, dried-out stingray corpse I found with multiple stab wounds behind its eyes as well as the big ray that appeared one day, strung up on the waterfront, with a bloody stump where its tail had been. I measured its diameter at forty-eight inches and, helped by four people, lifted it onto some scales. The needle went round to 194 pounds. With its tail, guts and lost fluid, its live weight would have been about 215 pounds. Despite this animal’s reputation—and the fear it inspires—its death seemed such a waste. But perhaps I would have felt less sentimental if I was not simply a visitor here. At any rate, one consolation was that I now had accurate data on its proportions. If I now caught a big one, I wouldn’t need to subject it to the stress of being weighed before returning it to the river.
But catching a giant was looking less and less likely. I’d caught a solitary thirty-pounder on my fourth day, but this hardly qualified. How strange that stingrays often plagued me in Brazil, when I wanted to avoid them, but now that I was targeting them, they were oddly elusive. As the days passed, I came under increasing pressure to change my approach, to carpet-bomb the river with baits. But I don’t believe this necessarily improves one’s chances, and besides, I only had one suitably heavy-duty outfit. In the end though, as a token concession, I set up a second outfit, a light boat rod with eighty-pound mono line.
On my last (tenth) day I went to a different type of spot: a fast, deep run, close to a snaggy bank. Three days before, a dorado fisherman had lost a stingray here, which probably never even realized it had been hooked. I swung a swamp eel out on my big rod and a nine-inch knife fish slightly closer. At 2:05 p.m. the line on the lighter rod moved. I picked it up, felt a steady pull, and then another. On setting the hook, I immediately knew it was a ray. There was a lunge, ripping line, and then it became solid, immobile, and yet animate. We pulled up the anchor and took up position above it. Half an hour later, after no further movement, I was convinced it had swum round a sunken tree. I asked my boatman José to edge across the current a little so I could pull from a different angle. The rod didn’t really have enough backbone, but when I locked the reel with my thumb and heaved, I felt a pulsing on the line and then a wrench. Then it was stalemate again—or, rather, the growing certainty that the aches in my back and arms, growing more intense by the minute, were going to be for nothing. If I could lift it off the bottom, the current might take us both downstream beyond the snaggy bank to a slack that lay off a sandy beach. But for two hours our position hardly changed. Then another desperate heave, with José expertly holding the boat still in the current, got it moving again. Looking up, I saw that we were now adjacent to the sand. But the water was still deep. If we couldn’t pull it to the shallows here, the ray would continue downstream and we’d never bring it up. For the first time, though, I got the sense that the weight on the line, although heavy, was tiring. The bow of the boat grated against sand, and I jumped out. Then it materialized in front of me: a huge circular shape, humped in the middle and the same color as the sand, veined with a network of dark shadowy lines. I pulled on my stab-proof gauntlets and, taking it by the spiracles, heaved it aground as the tail and skirt thrashed, throwing wet sand in my face. The time was 5:55. Bringing it in had taken nearly four hours.
At fifty-three inches across, I calculated its weight between 250 and 280 pounds—a squashed equivalent of the Queensland groper. But, being in the same genus as the ocellate stingray of the Amazon (Potamotrygon motoro) and living six hundred miles from the ocean, there’s no doubt that this is a true freshwater species. So it’s a record, of some sort, for me. But somehow, despite the numbers, a stingray doesn’t count. In my mind, and in appearance, it’s still an alien: a sea fish that strayed and then stayed.
I slid it back into the water, where its massive body dissolved, merging once more with the riverbed. All that remained were two dark eyes, opening and closing in a slow, pulsing rhythm. Then they too were gone.
CHAPTER 12
THE LAKE ILIAMNA MONSTER
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?
Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Job 41:1
LAKE ILIAMNA IN ALASKA IS North America’s very own Loch Ness. For generations the people living on its shores have told of a giant creature that rises from its depths to attack boats, consigning the hapless occupants to its icy waters. But whereas the famous Scottish cryptid is said to be a long-necked creature resembling an extinct sauropod, witnesses are very clear that the Alaskan monster is a fish.
Lake Iliamna is certainly the perfect place for a monster. At seventyseven miles long and twenty-two miles across at its widest point, with a depth of nearly 1,000 feet, it could swallow Loch Ness sideways (twenty-two miles long and mostly about a mile wide, with a maximum depth of 755 feet). Tucked away between mountains, it’s overlooked by a very sparse human population, who don’t venture beyond its margins. And with no roads leading in, it’s not easily accessible for outsiders. If a monster were living there, it would lead a very undisturbed life. The only thing that might alarm it would be an occasional dark object buzzing across the sky. These are the light planes that, since the 1940s, have been the preferred way of getting around this region. When the bush pilots started spottin
g things in the water, which broadly matched the natives’ descriptions, the old stories gained wider credence.
In these days of the Internet, just a few minutes’ research will bring up details of a half-dozen sightings from the air, between 1942 and 1977, by pilots and their passengers. All describe elongated animals between ten and thirty feet long. But a plane flying low at over 100 mph is not an ideal platform for observing secretive wildlife. By the time you’ve spotted something, it’s almost certainly seen you—and possibly heard you too. To avoid losing it, you must circle, but in only one of the reports did the witness keep the animal in view. And in those days before camera phones, nobody got any photographs.
My chance to look more closely into this mystery came in July 2009. This fish would be a perfect story for a River Monsters TV episode: a mythical lake monster that appeared to be a fish. As far as the production team were concerned, with their touching faith in my abilities, this would be right up my waterlogged street. But although we’d had some astounding successes on our previous shoots, which normally last just a couple of weeks, wasn’t this biting off more than we could chew? Like a giant piraiba with its jaws round an Amazon fisherman, would I end up regretting my overconfidence as I choked on something that, this time, was far too big for me?
I considered the countless man-hours that have been spent looking at Loch Ness, ranging from the twenty men with binoculars and cameras who spent five weeks scanning the water in 1934 for nine hours a day to the acoustic “nets,” sonar sweeps, and submersibles of more recent times. Although some sonar readings were interpreted as twenty-foot-long animate objects, there remains no conclusive proof, so the consensus among most scientists is that the monster doesn’t exist. But nor has it been definitively disproved (to do that you’d need to drain more than two cubic miles of water), which is why many people continue to find it so compelling. The balance of probability, however, remains on the side of nonexistence. Most “sightings” can be attributed to natural phenomena. Animals such as seals and otters can appear larger than they are if they are in open water—like the giant snake I saw in a Congo tributary in 1991 that shrank to a five-foot gaboon viper after hysterical villagers had launched a canoe and harpooned it. And I’ve seen in the Amazon how the wake of a distant boat, itself long passed, can break on offshore shallows in waves that look like a series of dark humps. The water itself, if enclosed, can slosh back and forth when the wind pushes it, thus causing eddies, interference, and standing waves, not to mention the wind-flattened patches in the midst of ripples, reflecting ominous darkness. On top of this there is the psychological dimension. Once a myth becomes established, it forms part of our mental model of the world and alters our perception, the way our brains interpret the fleeting patterns our eyes pick up. To a large extent we see what we want to see rather than what is really there.