River Monsters

by Jeremy Wade

  I’ve also had the opportunity to see rays up close through a dive mask, ten feet down in a crystal-clear lagoon beside the Rio Teles Pires in the south of the Amazon basin. In this aquarium-like setting, fed by springs bubbling up through white sand, I watched the rays glide and scuttle, powered by the graceful undulations of their flexible body margins, where the radiating rods of stiffening cartilage are clearly visible.

  In such surroundings, you get a sense of how pretty their blotched body patterns can be and even start to appreciate why some aquarists want to keep them as pets. Even the most common of the twenty-plus species, Potamotrygon motoro, the ocellate stingray, resembles a hypnotic galaxy of dancing suns.

  Some specimens are also among the biggest fish in the Amazon. In December 2000 US fishing writer Keith “Catfish” Sutton caught a discus stingray (Paratrygon aiereba), measuring six feet, two inches across and weighing 116 pounds, 2 ounces, where the Rio Branco flows into the Rio Negro, two hundred miles northwest of Manaus, and he also saw a bigger one the previous January, perhaps seven or eight feet across. In Peru there is talk of rays nearly ten feet across. In 2001 I watched from the comfort of a hammock in a wooden fishing boat as my friend John Petchey was reduced to a physical wreck by something he hooked downstream from Ilha Arraia (Stingray Island) in the Rio Solimões. After breaking John’s reel, this stingray finally allowed our skipper Josimar to grab it through the spiracles and haul it aboard our jumbo-sized canoe. This was also a discus ray, sandy-colored and a near-perfect circle, with a tiny afterthought of a stingless tail and a body pattern like cells seen under a microscope. We returned it unweighed, but I guessed 80 pounds. I’ve also seen a couple of solid-bodied 100-pounders from the Rio Purus that were caught on handlines.

  But recently I’ve learned that these are not the biggest stingrays in fresh water. In 2008 I heard reports of giant whiprays (so called because of their extremely long tails, sometimes more than twice the body length) being caught in Thailand, from the Maeklong (not to be confused with Mekong), and Ban Pakong rivers. These fish were so massive that some people are now claiming this species, Himantura chaophraya, is the biggest freshwater fish in the world. Although Thai fishermen have doubtless known about this fish for generations, scientists only formally described it and gave it a scientific name (the Chao Phraya is the river running through Bangkok) in 1989. This was on the basis of just three specimens, which is either an indication of their rarity or the difficulty of catching them, or both. Now a group of scientists from Chulalongkorn University, working with British ex-pat angler Rick Humphreys and a team of Thai fishermen, is trying to fill in all the gaps in our knowledge. By means of tags and a growing database, they hope to find out its growth rate, maximum dimensions, population size, and distribution—as well as the chemical make-up and mode of action of the black viscous venom coating its barb.

  Thailand is a well-trodden holiday destination, popular with backpackers, scuba divers, sex tourists, and affluent sun-seekers. But I was nervous about going there. After my first foreign fishing trip, to India in 1982, I had managed to get a couple of articles published in fishing magazines, and I was digging around for another destination and another fish story. The articles paid £40 and £25, which admittedly didn’t go far toward repaying my £285 air ticket and £160 travel costs (especially as I’ve yet to receive the latter fee). But suddenly, at age twenty-six, I had a glimmer of a possible direction in life. I had visions of my writing making other trips possible and, maybe—who knows?—even turning a profit. What I really needed to get things moving was a big story. I recalled an old picture I had seen in a textbook in the zoology department library at Bristol University. It showed an Asian man in a coolie hat peeping over the top of a huge smooth-skinned fish: deep-bodied, blunt-headed, and with a tail that looked a yard wide. At first I thought the creature was blind, a monstrous cave-dweller perhaps, until I noticed its eye low down near the corner of its mouth. The accompanying text said it was a Mekong giant catfish (although I could see no barbels). When I first saw that picture, the fish’s home was a war zone. But when I called it to mind again, the Vietnam conflict had been over for nearly a decade. I started scouring the London “bucket shops” for a discounted flight and found what I wanted with Tarom, the Romanian airline. A couple of months later, in March 1984, I arrived in Bangkok.

  In the meantime I’d found out a little more about my quarry. Unlike most catfish, the Mekong giant catfish, known as pla buk in Thailand, is a vegetarian that feeds on algae. No one has ever caught a noncaptive specimen on a line. Rather than being discouraged by this, I saw this as my story. I would be the first, possibly using some kind of stinky mashed paste bait of the kind I’d used to tempt carp, which is also normally a feeder on tiny food items but catchable if you know how.

  I headed for the northeast of the country, where the Mekong forms the border between Thailand and Laos. Because many countries are sensitive about their borders, I did the rounds of fisheries stations and obtained a letter of introduction explaining what I was doing. On top of that, a helpful English speaker checked me in with the border patrol police who, as if this were the custom at police stations throughout the world, invited me to stay. Their sleepy outpost was right next to the river, and they seemed to enjoy the novelty of a foreigner in their midst, patiently setting about trying to teach me Thai. But my inability to repeat even simple words with the right tones (low, mid, rising, high, falling) in the right places had them puzzled. If even infants and halfwits could cope with this exercise, why did this foreigner insist on coming back with made-up nonsense words or completely different words entirely?

  “Ngaw.” This was my allotted minder-cum-guide, an athletic cheerful man in his mid-twenties.

  Me: “Ngaw.”

  There were concerned shaking heads all round, but also encouragement to have another go. But still I kept getting it wrong. Then, on maybe the twentieth attempt, people were clutching their stomachs, slapping each other’s backs and wiping away tears. When they finally calmed down, they tried to explain to me, in nasal sing-songy Thai, that I’d just said (starting to giggle again) something that sounded like ngaw.

  My fishing, meanwhile, was meeting the same level of success. At the nearby gorge, fishing a slow, deep, silver spoon, I quickly found myself with a bent rod as I hooked one of the countless nets and longlines that were strung across the water. Even a hook dropped at my feet got snagged. So, instead, I went with a local fisherman in his leaky canoe, retrieving a longline that had been out overnight. He’d put out a hundred hooks, baited with grasshopper, but not a single one had a fish. I met a pla buk fisherman who showed me his nets, with meshes so wide that I could have squeezed through them. But he rarely put them out now because hardly any fish were left. I started to realize that my quest was turning into a failure.

  So when my hosts invited me to an evening of Thai boxing at the nearby town, I happily went along. I was given a front-row seat next to a bespectacled man who spoke some English and kept ordering me bottles of beer. He turned out to be the District Officer paying a visit, and I was told I’d be spending the night at the town’s police HQ. I was shown to an upstairs office, where I slept with an armed policeman beside me, and in the morning the man continued to ply me with beer and questions. Most of these seemed designed to uncover my political views, but I kept my replies noncommittal. He also said, many times, “You could disappear here—nobody would know.” I took this to be concern for my well-being, so I told him I’d be careful, but this didn’t seem to be the response he wanted. After a few hours of this, my host, by now quite drunk, suddenly snapped, “Give me your passport!” Looking at the photo page, which in those days listed one’s occupation, he declared, “This is not a teacher! This is a spy from the Middle East!”

  That my passport photograph looked rather villainous was true. And that embarrassing youthful attempt at a moustache, a bit like Prince, probably did merit some kind of punishment. But escorting me off to the cells, as they were doin
g now, seemed to be taking things a bit far. The next thing I knew, I was being repeatedly measured, with the results compared with the height in my passport, as if they now thought I was some kind of impostor. A few hours later, despite the quiet politeness of the lower ranks holding me, I was seriously worried.

  I wasn’t keen to end up with those other Westerners, shackled and forgotten in the “Bangkok Hilton.” I considered making a run for it, but that would be seen as confirming my guilt. Instead, using gestures, I asked that somebody go and fetch my bags from the border post, and a couple of hours later, to my surprise, they turned up. I rummaged inside and found my envelope of spare passport photos: one with Jimi Hendrix hair, one showing a scowling biker, and so on—but all me. “Look!” I indicated, to puzzled frowns, appealing to some logic in a situation that didn’t seem to have any. This is just what we’re like in England, always changing our hair and look. It’s just a fashion thing, not a disguise.

  Shortly after that, they let me go. I got straight on a bus going south and headed for Bangkok, anxious to get as far away as possible. During my questioning, the officer had confiscated all my film. This included shots of an eighty-six pound Probarbus, a relative of the Indian mahseer, that I’d seen doubled into a freezer at a fisheries station, and a stuffed pla buk that I’d seen in an old shed. This fish was as long as my outstretched arms and immensely deep-bodied. It was the biggest fish I had ever seen in my life, and I hazarded a weight of two hundred pounds. There were also several shots of the river, and this was what concerned me. They had all been taken with the permission of my police minder, but the District Officer wouldn’t know that. When he saw all those pictures of the border, he might conclude I had been a spy after all. (However, he might not see anything at all, as I had loaded bulk 35mm film into an assortment of used canisters, whose markings bore no relation to the contents. I did this to save money on film rather than it being an espionage thing, and I had given him written details of the correct development process needed. But his expression told me that he would be going by the canister labels, which might make him think, when everything came back blank, that he’d been double-bluffed.) So I headed to the British embassy to see if there was any way I could repair the situation and establish myself as a bona fide tourist. After telling me twice to come back the next day, they had an answer: “Our advice is to leave the country as soon as possible.”

  A few days later, traveling by bus and boat, I crossed overland into Malaysia. My savings from a year of teaching in London had financed a spectacular “blank.”

  Five years later I came across a newspaper article that made me break out in a sweat. It stated that around the time I was there, the British government had secretly sent members of the Special Air Service (SAS) to northeast Thailand to train Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. At first the British government denied this. Why would we upstanding Brits aid a genocidal dictator-turned-terrorist? The answer lay in the algebra of realpolitik. Because the Khmer Rouge had been overturned by the Vietnamese, some in the West now saw the people who had killed two million Cambodians as the good guys. This was a case of our enemy’s enemy being our friend or, rather (one more sideways step, because this was about the UK’s “special relationship” with the United States), our friend’s enemy’s enemy. My Kafkaesque nightmare suddenly made sense. There were things going on in this remote, tourist-free area that the world was never supposed to know about, and along comes this person with a notebook and camera, spinning some cock-and-bull story about fish....

  But in 2009 the world had moved on. All this was now old news that nobody, it turned out, cared much about—except those people who’d had their legs blown off courtesy of our taxes. I walked through arrivals at the spanking new Suvarnabhumi airport without feeling a hand on my shoulder and continued by van into Bangkok.

  The stingrays, known as pla kaben in Thai, are also little known about, and their enormity shocks those who encounter them. I’d been hearing about battles lasting up to six hours, with rods sometimes broken. The biggest recent catch was nearly eight feet across and estimated at around 600 pounds. (Some put it even heavier—at over 750 pounds—but it was not weighed because it was a pregnant female, and lifting such a heavy fish out of the water could have damaged it internally.)

  I was also surprised to find out how close the captures were to Bangkok. The tidal reach of the Maeklong, just forty miles from the capital, flows right through a built-up area, past houses, temples, and markets, all of which inevitably raised questions about the potential danger of these fish.

  One member of the fishing team had had a scary encounter. While handling a “small” (100-pound) stingray in a net, its spine scratched him at the base of his left index finger. “After five minutes, it feels like I’m holding a heavy stone,” he said. Then his whole arm and the left side of his trunk went numb as his heart raced and sweat poured from his face. At present there is no antidote to the venom, which appears to be similar to that of a pit viper. So he was more than relieved when he recovered after three hours.

  Another fisherman I spoke to, hauling a small one in by the spiracles, had its spine pierce his thigh to a depth of three inches. He crawled back to his house and was rushed to the hospital. Luckily, the spine went in at an oblique angle—any steeper and it could have opened his femoral artery, which, if not immediately shut off by applying pressure to the groin, could have caused fatal blood loss.

  So catch-and-release fishing for them is a serious business. For a start, stingrays can attach themselves, like a giant suction cup, to the river bottom, sometimes covering themselves with an equal mass of mud. This dictates the use of extremely heavy-duty tackle and a complete lack of subtlety in playing them. Light gear simply will not shift them. Period. On the first day I motored onto the river with the fishing team in a canopied long-tail boat, a narrow wooden vessel with a rearmounted automobile engine driving its ten-foot propeller shaft. The place we were heading for is nicknamed Area 51 because people say, “It’s full of aliens,” which do indeed look like underwater flying saucers. Once in position we put out multiple lines baited with live ten-inch snakeheads that were lip-hooked on size 10/0 circle hooks. Line was 160-pound monofilament, ridiculous in fresh water (and in the sea for that matter), that was backed with 100-pound braid. There’s a tide of a few feet at Area 51, and at low-water slack something took one of the baits. After letting it run, we tightened to set the hook and then I slackened the drag momentarily while I clipped into two harnesses, one round my lower back and another round my shoulders, and inserted the rod butt into a gimbal in front of me. Meanwhile, a second boat rafted up to our narrow vessel to create a broader platform. Otherwise, we risked rolling over and capsizing with a powerful fish under the boat. The other danger was that I’d go over the side if the line coming off the reel, under extreme tension, cut into the coils behind it and jammed. So one of the team was hanging onto the back of my harness. In my pocket, as a last resort, was a knife to cut the line.

  After only a couple of minutes, I know I have a very big fish here. My broomstick-stiff rod is bent into a semicircle, its tip just inches from the surface and occasionally disappearing under it. For extra leverage, my feet are up on the gunwales, and after ten minutes my bent legs feel like those of a weight lifter holding a squat halfway up. Even with the harnesses, my back is starting to complain—this is precisely what backs aren’t designed to do, and exactly the position in which the bent and compressed spinal column can pop a disc or two. I listen to the pain, but I can’t do anything to lessen it. In fact, I increase the drag a notch and strain harder because I want this to end. As I double and groan in response to the fish’s lunges, I feel like a boxer slugging it out in the ring, hoping my opponent will give up before I do. I gain line inch by inch, glad to have an extra, low gear on my reel, only to lose a foot or two at once as the rod is forced down to the folded rag that pads the gunwale. Somebody says it’s been an hour now, that I’ve been playing this grueling hybrid of tug-of-war and arm wre
stling. They’re pouring water over my head and on the reel. Mostly, the line is straight down, but at times it cuts sideways, spinning the boat. I bitterly regret not receiving the 5½-foot rod I ordered for this trip; this 7-footer gives the fish too much leverage. We pass the hour-and-a-half mark, but I can detect no weakening in the fish. What I’ve heard about these fish is no longer unbelievable. Four more hours of this is unthinkable. Then, at close to two hours, the rod springs back and I gain a couple of turns. It’s off the bottom! The rod tip bucks as I pump in more line. The crew have hung the big knotless net off the side of the boat, like a curtain, and as the pointed rostrum breaks the surface, they push the net underneath the fish with long bamboo poles. But the ray is too far away, and as I lean back to bring it closer, I hear a sudden loud crack and the weight of the fish has gone.