River Monsters (20 page)

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, it 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 rugby ball. 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.

10

PARIAH OF THE BAYOUS

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 armoured scales heavier and thicker than those of any other fish. (The French explorers in the 1700s called this near-indestructible 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
Game Fish of the World
, the comprehensive compendium of piscine exotica published in 1949, the alligator gar merited only a
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 during the last five summers and had 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 onto 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.

This extermination mostly went unlamented, even after a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) study in 1987 debunked the belief that this ‘trash fish’ is the nemesis of the
nation’s ‘game’ species. An analysis of the stomach contents of 209 alligator gar, caught from Sam Rayburn reservoir using gillnets and juglines and weighing between 18 and 156
pounds, revealed that, far from eating their own weight in game fish every forty-eight hours as was commonly believed, most had their stomachs empty. Of those that had fed, largemouth bass made up
just 3.4 per cent of their diet. Their most popular prey was gizzard shad (26.4 per cent), followed by channel catfish (14.9 per cent) and freshwater drum (12.6 per cent). Miscellaneous dietary
items included two coots, eleven fishhooks, an artificial lure, and a plastic bag. This study was also significant for another reason: it demonstrated that the scientific community, if nobody else,
had started to take note of this species. Texas was, by now, the main refuge of the once-widespread alligator gar. Would I get to see one before they disappeared for good?

A documentary film on alligator gar finally got the green light when
River Monsters
went from being a one-time programme to a seven-part series, five years after I’d originally
touted the idea. I then had to dig out the old notes and cross my fingers that the fish were still there. I’d been told that gar fishing is best in the summer months – the hotter the
better – so we had to race to get everything set up before we missed the season. The first stop was a couple of days on the Trinity River with Dr Dave Buckmeier and some TWPD scientists, who
had started a gar-tagging programme. But their juglines caught nothing, and the nets brought in only a two-foot longnose gar, one of the four smaller gar species (along with spotted, shortnose, and
Florida gar). However, some local men fishing for catfish had caught a small alligator gar on a multihook trotline, and they donated this to the team. To attach the acoustic tag, we covered the
fish in a damp towel, including its eyes because we had just brought it into the air from dark water, and then drilled a couple of 1/8-inch holes just under the dorsal fin. But I didn’t even
feel its muscles tense. My observation that it was like a visit to the dentist was unconsciously apt. Gar scales are made of thick bone and are coated with a tough layer of an enamel-like substance
called ganoine. Whatever it was that finished off the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period didn’t put an end to these tough customers, although before
that time gars also existed in Africa, India, southern Europe, and South America. Now they are only in parts of North and Central America. But from the scientists’ fishing results I
wasn’t optimistic about catching a big gator gar for the cameras.

Cut to another stretch of the Trinity, with the water so low that it was an obstacle course of tree skeletons. To navigate this twisting, outboard-destroying waterway, we’d booked an
airboat, owned by bow-fishing guide Bubba Bedre. An unsilenced Chevy engine powered the caged aircraft propeller by way of a reducing gearbox so the blade tips wouldn’t disintegrate, and I
didn’t need to be asked twice to put on my ear protection as we blasted downriver. After five minutes, we cut the motor and drifted seventy yards to a steep-banked L-shaped bend, where the
flow had scooped out a deep hole on the bottom. As we quietly floated on the edge of the slow current, a fish noisily broke the surface twenty yards away. My mind did an instant bit of
fish-behaviour cross-referencing, and I guessed this was both a good sign and a bad sign: good because it was a big fish, easily over one hundred pounds, and bad because it knew we were there and
was, therefore, unlikely to take a bait.