by Jeremy Wade
Snaffling fish from an angler’s line is something that pike sometimes do in English rivers. But these reports indicated something more regular and systematic. The team had put the word out among local fishermen, asking them to report any incidents, but for a long time they heard nothing. Then, a week before we arrived, word came of two fish that had been taken. Our informant had seen the shark responsible and estimated it at seven feet long. The time had come to put a bait in the water—but there was a problem.
These were intelligent sharks. They were clever enough to identify a food source that they didn’t have to chase around, and they were clever enough not to be fooled when that same food source was attached to a thick wire leader. (The drag of this would also make the bait swim less naturally.) The year before, the scientists had tried to recapture the big fish in order to attach a more sophisticated tag, but the shark had ignored baits right on top of it. In addition, a local farmer had put up a quarter-million-rand bounty (about $30,000) on the fish, after which fishermen had been spotted on their way to the river with heavy shark gear—but nobody caught anything. However, Meaghen had since been given a leader that she’d been told should work, that a man who had caught a Zambezi shark further north had made. Just by looking at it, I could tell that this angler knew what he was doing, and I agreed to keep the details of its construction confidential, for reasons that will become apparent later. But, essentially, I was going to be fishing much, much lighter than I had expected, which I wasn’t altogether happy about.
Normally I gear up for the largest fish I am likely to encounter. There are some who consider this approach “unsporting” and crude because landing average-sized fish can be too easy. Fishing light, the argument goes, requires more skill. But although this has some truth in it, these critics fail to take account of the fact that deceiving a fish on fine tackle is easier. At this crucial point, the angler with heavy gear is the one who suffers the self-imposed handicap. Thick, springy nylon line can be a nightmare to cast if you have no other way of getting it out, and it drags more in the current, making bait presentation more tricky. But I don’t see the point of hooking a very large fish if there’s a good chance that I’ll then lose it, trailing a length of broken line. So fishing light here—in strong, tidal water full of corrugated iron and wood debris, the remains of seventy-odd jetties washed into the river by recent floods—went somewhat against my principles.
January in South Africa is high summer, but on the river the weather is windy. Our first job was to get bait, but the team’s seine net pulled up nothing suitable. We dispersed with light rods and a small supply of thumb-sized mud prawns, but nothing bit. This is often the way when fishing for a predator, be it an Amazon catfish, a goonch, or a goliath tigerfish: a lot of your time is consumed struggling to catch small fish. And we needed something soon if we were to try for sharks today: the short period of slack water at the bottom of the tide would soon be upon us. When the tide started to push again, presenting the bait in a natural looking way would become increasingly difficult. Skipper Mark Woof anchored the boat at a place called Rooiwalle, Afrikaans for “red wall,” where the river widens at a bend with a steep bank overlooking it, and after catching nothing ourselves, we were relieved when team member Paul van Nimwegen pulled alongside with a prime silver-flanked baitfish.
The fish, which was spotted and making grunting noises, is known locally as the spotted grunter. It was nearly two feet long, deep bodied, spiny finned, and about four pounds in weight. I nicked the hook lightly into its back, lowered it into the water, and let the slackening tide take it slowly downstream. Ten feet up from the bait was an orange balloon, attached by a thin rubber band, which would allow the bait to swim freely in the upper layers but break away if a shark took so the shark would not feel any drag, which could alarm it. Then I briefed the film crew. For once I didn’t have an issue with boat noise, as, by all accounts, the sharks here actually zero in on noise, much like Amazon pink dolphins. So everyone could drop cables and drink cans as much as they liked. I would even join the fun, splashing the surface with the rod tip, the same way you do when fishing for piranha. If a fish hit the bait, the important thing was to remember that I was using a circle hook and override the reflex to tighten up immediately. To make sure the shark had properly taken the bait, I would wait for a count of twenty before slowly engaging the drag. This gradual increase in tension would then pull the hook from wherever it was in the mouth or throat to instead lodge in the corner of the jaw. The last thing we wanted—for our sakes or the shark’s—was a deep hook-up.
We settled in to wait. The water ran brown and sluggish now. I was fishing off the stern with the balloon bobbing just fifteen yards away—if the sharks are attracted to the boat, why fish a long way off? I soon noticed the stern was no longer pointing downriver; it had swung nearly ninety degrees and was now pointing to the far bank, indicating that the tide was on the turn. Then, a movement caught my eye: a rapid dip of the balloon, creating a coronet of jumping water around it, like an exploding raindrop. The line was no longer pointing at the balloon but instead curving off to the left, and my spool was starting to turn, gathering speed.
“One! ... two! ... “ I started. We’d been in position barely half an hour, and after an initial pause of disbelief, the crew scrambled to action stations. The line was going out at a frightening rate, and my heart was in my mouth as I slowly pushed the drag lever forward. This seemed to have the effect of making the fish run even faster, and I yelled at Mark to hurry up with the anchor in case I ran out of line. The fish was heading for a protruding branch, and I didn’t seem to be making any impression on it as we started to follow with the motor. But as I gained line, it turned away to the left, into what looked like clear water. My relief was only momentary: a message then came up the line telling me this fish was about to escape.
I had about eighty yards of line out, but it was not running directly to the fish. A horrible grating told me that it had swum round a sunken snag. The line could go through at any second. To take pressure off the line, I loosened the drag, and after a frantic attempt to visualize what was going on, I directed Mark to take a curving course to the left, around the perceived position of the snag. With huge relief I felt a live weight again—the line was clear! We could now work closer to the fish and get more control over where it went. But as I wound line onto the reel, my heart sank again. A piece of line surfaced that looked as if it had been shaved by a razor, and then another and another. What had started out as eighty-pound breaking strain now had several weak points that could be just half that—or even less.
The fish now changed its tactics. Having failed to secure its freedom through speed, it now hung deep, very close to the boat, occasionally surging away for a few yards and then allowing me to gain line back—but never allowing me to lift it up. Each time the damaged line grated through the rod rings, I winced. I needed to get it in quickly, but too much pressure would cause the line to break. Somebody told me the shark had been on for an hour. I remembered Eugene telling me that his father once lost a shark after nine hours. The next day it washed up on the shore, and he realized he had been fighting a dead weight, literally, for most of that time. Sharks are negatively buoyant, having no swim bladder. They get their lift from their large pectoral fins, which act like wings when the shark is moving forward. But when they stop swimming, they sink. A couple of times now I’d seen a knot peep above the surface, the Bimini twist where a short length of double line started just above the trace. In other circumstances this would have given some hope. A normal shark trace is strong enough to pull the last few yards in by hand, but not this one. And besides, the knot was no longer in sight.
We then entered a zone that was stuck outside time. I heard somebody say that another hour had passed, but nothing was different. The same few yards of line were repeatedly and laboriously gained and then taken back again as my hunched body repeated the same moves—now straightening a little, now crumpling as if from a punch. The l
ocked muscles in my back pleaded with me to end this brutal dance. I tried to shut them out, to stay focused on the wrenches and lunges of my invisible foe. A late reaction could cause the shaved line to part. But a voice inside my head, getting ever-louder, told me there would be no shame in that. Sooner or later, it was the only outcome, so why prolong the agony? Besides, this was all about getting a shark for the scientists. The sun was now sliding down, and we’d never be able to deal with this shark in the dark. This was make-or-break time. We resolved to grab the double line the next time it appeared, but the first few times we managed this, it was wrenched out of our hands.
I noticed power lines hanging above us. Our slow sliding had carried us five miles upriver. The bottom here shelves up to shallows off the north bank, and the shark reacted by running for the channel. We made our way above it, and there was the knot again, and the leader swivel this time. I backed away from the side as gloved hands pulled on thick mono and then the final six feet of wire: two cheese-wire-thin strands loosely twined. The shark was just below the surface, but they couldn’t reach round its great girth to fasten the tow straps, so we made the decision to use the gaff. This was the only way we’d lift the head enough to get the strap around it. But although barely punctured in the thick hide of its chin, the shark reacted by going into a spin, twisting itself free. I thrust the rod into a spare pair of hands, grabbed the gaff, and tried to secure the fish a second time. I felt the wooden handle twist and start to splinter. If it went, the wire leader could garotte someone. I hung on with all my strength while the strap was looped behind the shark’s winglike pectorals and tightened. Only now could we widen the circle of our attention to the body behind that fearsome head. At this point Meaghen’s comment was so graphic that we had to delete it from the soundtrack.
We towed the shark to a mudbank and heaved it ashore by its tail. Tags went in and the hook came out from where it was neatly lodged in the corner of the jaw. Then we walked it into the river, waist-deep to the drop-off where we launched it into deeper water.
With a total length of 9 feet, 9½ inches (2.99 meters), this shark was one of the biggest male bull sharks ever recorded anywhere in the world. By continuing the curve on weight-for-length charts, Meaghen estimated its weight at around 525 pounds. To understand the biology behind bull sharks surviving in fresh water is one thing, but to see a fish this size come out of a river is quite another. Perhaps this is why only now did something else fully sink in, something Eugene and Cobus had told me. Even though a Zambezi shark had killed a lifeguard further up the coast the year before and a great white had carried off a bather further south, just as we were setting out for South Africa, here in the Breede River, bull sharks have never attacked a human being. This raised another why? The fact that this shark was a male and that no small sharks were ever caught—like the three-footers I took from the Brisbane River in Australia—seemed to rule out that they were using this river as a nursery. Everything now said that they were coming here to feed, which made the fact that they were ignoring people, given their track record elsewhere, a real riddle.
But it turned out they weren’t ignoring people. When the tracking boat followed this fish, the position of its signal indicated that it was regularly approaching people as well as boats in the water. This unseen ten-foot beast would get within just a few yards before veering off. The previous year’s giant female had done the same thing. Despite the cloudy water, they seemed to identify the noise source as human and then decide it was something they didn’t want to eat.
The next day another shark took, but after an hour, it bit through the leader when it rose to the surface and then did a rolling dive, thereby wrapping itself in the line and bringing the leader across its teeth. Paul had had the leader in his hands twice but hadn’t been able to hold it. The next day I had another take, landing the fish after two and a half hours. This one was a couple of inches shorter than the first fish, but it was more solid bodied. It took just six feet from the boat after I’d pulled the bait in to be near a grunter that Mark was bringing in. Previously I’d been throwing stones at the balloon to get more attention. We thought this fish had also rolled up the line because it wasn’t pointing to its nose, but this turned out to have an odd explanation. The hook had somehow caught in the fourth gill slit and was holding by just a small sliver of skin. It was the only time I had ever seen the turned-in point of a circle hook catch anywhere outside the mouth. So this was not, strictly speaking, a fair catch, but that was academic to the scientists, who had another fish to tag and follow. The team was divided on what to call this fish. The two nominations were “Paul” after our expert deck-hand who brought it in and “Duncan” after our director who, in a Hitchcock moment, was the only person available to lend a hand. In the end we opted for a mutant hybrid of these two and called this nine-foot, eight-inch male bull shark “Pumpkin.” (Meaghen had christened the first Jeremy.)
With two sharks now tagged, the data was coming thick and fast. The first thing that struck everyone was how much ground the sharks were covering: patrolling a regular beat some five miles long. This made it harder for me to fish because we didn’t want to recatch a fish that was already tagged. But when I fished outside this beat in water the hydrophone had swept and found to be “all clear,” I had no takes. From Meaghen’s original guess of maybe fifteen sharks in the river, we began to revise our estimate down. I returned to the proven spots, but the two fish seemed omnipresent. The only way to be sure they weren’t around was to transfer the hydrophone to the fishing boat during the brief slack-water period when a bait could be presented. One windy day we could hear a very faint beep through an ocean of static, coming from about five hundred yards away, near a couple of other boats, and I was hoping the surface chop would cut down its hearing range. But suddenly Meaghen warned me that it was getting nearer. By the time I’d asked her how fast and wound in the bait, the signal strength was ninety-eight: it was right underneath us.
I didn’t catch any more sharks, although I did lose one as I tightened up after a take and the line cut on something underwater. My guess from this is that there were perhaps only two or three sharks in the river at the time. Knowing this, some people might argue that removing the sharks would be a realistic strategy to ensure human safety. But our observations clearly reveal that this would be misguided—and could have disastrous consequences.
When I came to the Breede River, I never imagined that what we would find out, in just two short weeks, would take the investigation so far forward and actually give likely answers to the big questions about sharks in this river. Our capture of two large males and the fact that no small sharks are ever caught pretty much rules out that bull sharks are using the river as a nursery, as a place to release their young. Instead, they seem to come here during the warmer months of the year primarily to feed. But this is not normal bull shark feeding behavior. Here they are feeding in a very specific, intelligent way. Rather than wasting energy chasing free-swimming fish, they are taking it from anglers’ lines, like plucking fruit from a tree. This is like a form of protection payment. They take a percentage of the anglers’ catch and, in return, they leave humans alone.
This is truly a remarkable coexistence—but it is also very fragile. Specifically, there are two things that could threaten it. The first is a decline in numbers of grunter, its normal prey. This is already starting to happen thanks to some anglers being creative in their interpretation of regulations. To avoid ambiguity, this should be two grunter per boat (or, better, none) instead of two for everybody in the boat. Humans find grunter tasty too, but this regulation would be easier for fishermen to swallow if the reason were made clear.
The second necessary measure is to protect the sharks: forbid all fishing for them. Both the sharks I caught were observed to go back to their normal routine of taking grunters from anglers’ lines, but if anything happened to make them wary of their normal prey, they could revert to normal, opportunistic bull shark behavior, namely checking
out any living creature they come across. Regular attempts to catch them would be sure to do this. As we have learned, they won’t be hooked on heavy gear; however, on light gear they are extremely hard to bring in. Just a few break-offs could be enough to have them changing their diet. It would be the classic unintended consequence, so common when humans interfere with nature, but in this case it’s one that the application of forethought can help avoid. It’s also a classic illustration of the best way to deal with fear: instead of wanting to destroy the thing that you are afraid of, the answer often lies in simply understanding it.
CHAPTER 15
BOL KATA
VEN: Now, Piscator, where will you begin to fish?
PISC: We are not yet come to a likely place, I must walk a mile further yet, before I begin.
Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653
AT THE END OF A SWELTERING DAY in the tropical lowland forest of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Francis Sambin takes off his clothes and gets into waist-deep water at the edge of the mud-brown Sepik River. As he takes a cooling wash, something bumps against him. He brushes it away, but the next moment sharp teeth are clamping and then tearing his genitals. He is so severely mutilated that he bleeds to death. It is 2002, and the local Pidgin language, based on a simplified version of English, gives the mystery perpetrator a graphic name: bol kata.
Sometime later, washing in the same stretch of river, Nick Sakat feels something touch his leg. He kicks it away, but it fastens onto his foot and pulls him toward deeper water. Terrified and confused, he makes a grab for a moored log raft—his family’s washing platform—and manages to drag himself onto its surface. There is nothing in the native fauna that makes a bite mark like the gushing wound in his foot, a mark that resembles, in shape and size, the imprints of human teeth. He can only think it is an underwater spirit—an invisible person.