River Monsters (19 page)

I finally got my chance for another crack at this species when we filmed the second series of
River Monsters
. But in the ten years I’d been away, catches at Lake Nasser had tailed
off. Commercial fishing could be part of the reason, and it’s also possible that the water’s productivity has declined after the initial input of nutrients from the flooded land. But a
major factor seems to be fish intelligence. Catch-and-release means that fish learn: a straightforward association between a particular thing in the water and a bad experience. Even when I was
there, the perch were starting to reject large, gaudy lures in favour of smaller, more lifelike patterns. Now soft artificials and hard-to-catch livebaits are the order of the day, but even these
don’t fool the bigger fish.

So we started to look for places that are less accessible. All over the world, fish populations are under attack thanks to the human population’s increasing need for food. And with fewer
fish, there are fewer big fish. Therefore, for most species we’ll never know if the old stories about monsters are true. So the fisherman’s El Dorado is a place where you step back in
time, where people have kept away. Mere remoteness is not enough of a deterrent. In the Amazon, for example, fishermen will drag canoes through miles of forest for the chance to make a lucrative
catch. There needs to be something else protecting the fish.

The range of the Nile perch extends to the Senegal and Niger rivers in West Africa and also to the Congo. But its real heartland is the African Rift Valley, where it is known as the
mbuta
or
netch-assa
. The Rift Valley is a two thousand-mile-long rip in the earth’s crust, where a sliver of East Africa is in the process of pulling apart from the rest of the continent.
Eventually the sea will flood this sunken trench, but even now the rift can be seen from space because of the water it already contains. The largest Rift Valley lake is the ribbon-shaped Lake
Tanganyika. At nine-tenths of a mile deep (4,800 feet), it is the second deepest lake in the world, after the mile-deep Lake Baikal in Siberia (5,387 feet). But I was more interested in two lakes
at the southern end of Ethiopia: Chamo and Abaya. These are said to contain the largest Nile crocodiles in Africa, which, in theory, ought to be keeping the fishermen away.

But before unpacking my rods, I called at the National Museum in Addis Ababa to check out some of the earliest known fishing tackle. The Rift Valley is well known as the home of the earliest
human ancestors – Lucy, Ardi, and other so-called missing links – so it was also, most probably, home to the world’s first fishermen. I tried to imagine exactly what that meant:
the realisation not only that water was a potential source of food but also that it contained hidden dangers. I also thought about how this tested and fuelled early human ingenuity. Did they first
collect fish with their hands from drying-out ponds and streams, as I have done from the Luangwa River in Zambia? Did they then progress to making traps, or were spears the next step? The items I
was looking at – but wasn’t allowed to touch – were fragments of dark bone eight thousand years old with pointed ends and notched edges, and they came from the same site where a
three-foot-long skull from an early Nile perch was unearthed. There was also a precursor of the fish hook: a double-ended spike measuring three inches long. I’ve seen exactly the same thing
in the Amazon but made of wood. With a cord tied to a notch around its middle, it is threaded inside the body of a small fish. When this is then swallowed by a bigger fish, the spike turns sideways
and impales the predator’s throat.

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 learned 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 co-operative 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 practised 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 of 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 191½-pound 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 the 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 travelled 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 towards 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 towards 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 on to land, away from any hungry crocs.