River Monsters (33 page)

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 visualise 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 on to 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
realised 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 locked 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.

Having towed the shark to a mudbank, we jumped out and heaved it ashore by its tail. We quickly attached the tag, a black cylinder a few inches long, and removed the hook from where it was
neatly lodged in the corner of the jaw. Then we walked the fish back 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 metres), this shark was one of the biggest male bull sharks ever recorded anywhere in the world. By continuing the curve on the
weight-for-length chart, Meaghen estimated its weight at around 525 pounds. To understand the biology behind bull sharks surviving in fresh water is one thing, but to witness a fish so fearsome and
enormous 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 the bull sharks 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 shark, the position of its signal indicated that it was regularly approaching people as well as boats
in the water. This unseen ten-footer 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 day after I had another take and landed the fish after two and a half hours. This one was a couple of inches shorter than the first, 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 because the line 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 behaviour. 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, their 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 of 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 behaviour, namely checking out any living creature they
came across. Regular attempts to catch them would be sure to do this. As we have learned, these sharks 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.

As in Australia, these river bull sharks are a fact of life. But the Breede River fish, perhaps more than any other predator, teach us the best and safest way to deal with our fear of them.
Instead of wanting to destroy the thing that you are afraid of, the answer often lies in simply understanding it.