River Monsters (32 page)

The spear’s breakaway point, secured by two feet of cord, had passed through the snakehead’s back muscle, just underneath the long dorsal fin. A flesh wound only, from which this
tough customer would easily recover. Having been forced to confront the fish in this way, I was overwhelmed by this improbable twist: that both fisherman and fish would survive. Held in the water
after being freed from the cord, it rested quietly in my hands and tilted up to sip some air. As it started to flex, I took one last look at its broad black-and-white flanks, abstract patterned
like the map of some secret land. The eyes, like black marbles, told me nothing, as it flicked its tail and melted back into the water.

15

RIVER SHARK REVISITED

What they had found was the largest bull shark ever recorded anywhere in the world: over thirteen feet in total length (four metres exactly) and weighing an estimated one thousand pounds. But
its immense size was not the only thing that caused such waves. What intrigued other biologists was that it was in an area where they had never before recorded the species: two hundred miles south
of its normal range, in water thought to be too cold for the species to survive.

But what caused the wider stir was something else. This water is also populated by jet skiers, kite-surfers, and holidaying bathers, and it is flanked by luxury homes and flats. In the popular
imagination, this earthly paradise should have been free from such hellish beasts for one fundamental reason: it is up a river.

For some biologists and fishermen, the bull shark’s ability to swim up rivers – way beyond any estuarine saltiness and into pure fresh water – is well known. And this is
something that no amount of hand-wringing about property values or wanting to shoot the messenger can do anything about. But the reason why a bull shark was in the Breede River was a mystery. Was
it a freak occurrence or did it have company? And why was it so astoundingly huge? To try to get answers, the team returned to the river the following year. Their interest was not only academic.
Although most sharks are harmless to humans, bull sharks are one of the few species, alongside tiger sharks (
Galeocerdo cuvier
) and great whites (
Carcharodon carcharias
), that are
confirmed man-eaters. In other words, was this a human tragedy waiting to happen?

In the hope of shedding light on this dark subject, they had brought three acoustic tags and a hydrophone. Each tag would enable them to track a shark until the tag’s miniature battery ran
out after about three months. But first they had to catch a shark. This was where I came in. With my experience of catching large fish from rivers and, more specifically, river bull sharks in
Australia, I was ideally qualified to join the investigation.

From Cape Town, the film crew and I drove four hours east along the coast through parched empty countryside to the sleepy town of Witsand at the river mouth. White-painted houses gleamed against
a cobalt sky like a picture-postcard. A bar of windswept sand reached across the river mouth, leaving only a narrow gap on the far side where the river joined the Indian Ocean. This setting
couldn’t have been more different from the jungles and mountains that are my normal fishing grounds. And seeing the fishermen wading up to their waists to collect prawns and cast flies, I
realised that this investigation was different too. My fishing success or failure could make the difference between life and death.

In some sport-fishing circles, a shark is ‘caught’ once you’ve touched the wire leader, which you then cut as close to the shark as possible, trusting that in time the hook
will rust out, especially if it’s not stainless. Similarly, if you want to attach a thin plastic ‘spaghetti tag’ with serial and phone numbers, you’d normally do this
remotely, using a long stick. But fixing an acoustic tag is more hands-on: we would need to restrain the shark in the shallows or on the bank while we also took accurate measurements, samples of
any parasites, and a small fin clipping for DNA analysis.

The fish caught in 2009, by South African angler Hennie Papenfuss after three fishless days, was a heavily pregnant female. Although some shark species lay their eggs in a protective case
– the so-called ‘mermaid’s purse’ – most retain them in the body. Bull sharks take the process one stage further, with the yolk sac turning into a type of placenta
that is embedded in the uterus and supplies the embryo with nutrients from the mother. It’s remarkably similar to the mechanism in mammals, and was first observed in sharks by Aristotle, in
the fourth century BC. Coming into the world at between twenty and thirty inches long, bull shark pups have a significant head start on most other fish.

After tagging and releasing the big female, the scientists took to the tracking boat, lowered the hydrophone into the water, and rotated it until they picked up the ‘ping’ from the
tag. The plan now was to follow it, day and night, in continuous shifts for two weeks. But four hours later it was still lying in the same place. The team’s leader, Meaghen McCord, began to
worry that the fish might not have recovered from its long struggle on the line. If this was the case, they’d remain in the dark about what this shark had been doing here, although for some
people living beside the river, its death would have been good news.

Then, suddenly, it was no longer there. The tracking boat swept up and down the river, dipping and rotating the hydrophone every five hundred yards, but all they heard was crackling static.
Finally, they picked up a signal in the surf zone, outside the river mouth. Maybe the carcass had been washed out here? But the signal’s source was moving. Maybe its recent experience had
told it that the river was not a good place to be, or maybe the moving water here was just a good place to get re-oxygenated.

What happened next surprised everybody. The shark reentered the river, and when the team had to pack up fifteen days later, it was still there. During this time it was found to patrol a beat
some fifteen miles long, up and down on each tide, twice daily – a total distance of fifty to sixty miles a day. The furthest upstream it travelled was twenty miles from the sea, which is
beyond the influence of the tide, and where there is no trace of salt in the water.

The scientists’ hypothesis, based on its continued presence, was that it was in the river to pup. Compared with the sea, rivers contain fewer predators that could prey on the young. For a
start, there are no other sharks and possibly no male bull sharks that won’t hesitate to eat their own kind. But set against that, a small bull shark isn’t as comfortable
physiologically in fresh water as a big one. It has a higher surface-area-to-volume ratio, so it has to expend much more energy expelling water from its tissues. Giving birth to their young in a
river would only make sense if the pros exceeded the cons.

To find out more, we needed another shark. I had come well equipped with my own big bull shark gear, which was based on what I had previously borrowed from Terry Hessey in Australia, for shore
fishing in the Brisbane River mouth. This comprised a custom-built 5½-foot shark rod, an 80-pound-class reel holding nearly half a mile of 80-pound mono, and PVC-coated wire rope in
strengths up to 1,300 pounds. But the information I now got hold of meant that I could have left all this at home.

Witsand used to be a big port for commercial fishing vessels, but nowadays only a handful of boats are left. Eugene Beukes skippers one of these, and he told me that occasional Zambezi sharks,
as bull sharks are known in Africa, have been turning up here for decades. To prove that this was no fisherman’s tale, he showed me a sepia-tinted photograph of his father with a 532-pound
female caught in 1963. In those days the commercial boats used to fish in the river for dusky kob, a fish the colour of old pewter that can grow to over 100 pounds. Once in a while, when a
fisherman was pulling in his line, suddenly there would be less weight on the end and in would come just the kob’s head, cleanly cut behind the gills. If this kept happening, it made a
serious dent in the fisherman’s income, so one year, after bringing in sixteen kob heads, Eugene’s father baited a wire trace on a handline. He landed the shark after a one-hour battle
and didn’t boat any more incomplete kob that year.

Cobus Wiid, a sun-tanned wiry man in his early sixties who grew up here, told me something similar. ‘The people of Witsand always refer to
the
shark,’ he said. He remembers
another fisherman, his neighbour Johan Engela, who caught a 352-pounder in the mid-1980s after having several fish removed from his line. ‘There were no more incidents after this shark was
killed,’ he said, referring to the fright he received, earlier that same year, when something grabbed the plastic bait container hanging off the back of his boat.

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 (nearly £22,000) 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.