River Monsters (26 page)

As we released the mother ship, and watched the tip of her long, whiplike tail disappear, I reflected on the fact that this fish, which Rick estimated at over 350 pounds, came to the boat in
just twenty minutes. And I couldn’t help wondering again how big the unseen fish had been.

But now was the time to pursue another question: is this giant a true freshwater species? Although a salinity meter had shown that the water here is fresh when the tide is running out, all of
the recent, confirmed captures have been in the tidal zone of the Maeklong and the last few miles of the strong-flowing Ban Pakong. However, we had heard reports of other captures from locations
well inland.

One fisherman told me of a ray accidentally enclosed in a net 100 miles up the Ban Pakong. Something had bumped one of his companions in the stomach, and then they saw it rise in the water
before it slid underneath and away. He put it at over 200 pounds. Another man showed me the picture, and tail, of a fish he caught 150 miles up the Chao Phraya at Nakhon Sawan in December 2008.
After picking up a live carp on a thirty-hook longline, it resisted the efforts of ten men for four hours, dragging their boat for more than a mile. As I listened to the story, someone showed me
mobile phone footage of the fish with two men standing on its back. It certainly looked very big, but was it really 704 pounds, which they said was its weight at the market? It was impossible to
say.

Then I travelled to the Mekong, very close to where I’d been arrested. Here fisherman Boon Song told me that a big stingray, six feet across, had torn his net ten years before. When I
showed him a picture of the Nakon Sawan fish, he said it was the same fish – and the same size. If this report is true, that’s a stingray nearly a thousand miles from the South China
Sea. Another fish was reported in July 2008 from the Mun River, a tributary joining the Mekong some five hundred miles inland. This one measured over six feet across and was weighed, in pieces at
the market, at 411 pounds.

But the reports of these fish growing to over one thousand pounds remain unproven, so the jury is still out on the world’s biggest freshwater fish. In some ways this is an academic
question, but it does have wrapped inside it the mysteries of all of the world’s great river fish, so it’s worth asking. Most people would discount beluga and white sturgeon, both
recorded at well over one thousand pounds, on the grounds that they are not (normally) full-time river residents. After them comes a disparate shoal of true freshwater species that, in all
likelihood, exceed five hundred pounds (arapaima, piraiba, and Mekong giant catfish, although only the last has the paperwork to prove it) and some others that might (Nile perch, alligator gar,
wels catfish, Siamese carp [
Catlocarpio siamensis
], dog-eating catfish [
Pangasius sanitwongsei
], and goonch). But which of these has – or had – the biggest specimen at any
time, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, where the ‘freshwater’ whipray fits into the picture is also unclear, as it is most commonly found in tidal, brackish water and could probably
survive in salt water (although, so far, no one has found it there). Unlike Amazon rays, the Thai whipray appears to be still making the transition to fresh water.

And now this grey area has another interloper. One year after my return to Thailand, I heard of another giant river ray whose freshwater credentials are in no doubt. And I started making plans
to see if I could catch one of these monsters myself.

The Thais sometimes call the stingray
pla rahu
, the eclipse fish, as its shape resembles the dark disc that covers the sun and turns day into night. Eclipses are
universally feared, and thus, by association, the stingray is believed to be a bringer of bad luck – and not just in the obvious, cause-and-effect way, when an unlucky victim encounters its
spine.

Sometime after the giant
Himantura chaophraya
snapped my rod and escaped, I noticed a hollow in my upper right arm, as if a golf ball–sized piece of muscle had wasted away. On my
return home, I showed it to my doctor, who told me that one of the two tendons anchoring the top of my biceps had broken. He referred me to a specialist and said I would probably need to cancel my
next film trip, for which all permits had been organised and all kit and crew booked, because I’d need urgent surgery followed by six weeks’ convalescence. If we waited too long to
operate, according to one website, my arm would lose 30 to 50 per cent of its strength.

The news from the specialist was mixed. If I’d been an athlete in my twenties, they would have opened up my arm and tried to re-anchor the tendon. But in my case, doing that wasn’t
worth it. The good news was that the loss of strength is only 5 to 7 per cent, which I can live with. Also, with no tendon, there was now no pain – which was a relief of sorts, as my arm had
been aching for several months beforehand. So although I can’t be certain that that was the moment when it happened, I now have a hole in my arm, rather like one of the depressions that
stingrays excavate in the Amazon shallows, as a permanent reminder of the giant Thai whipray that I lost. And although the two events have become linked in my mind, I don’t blame the ray or
subscribe to the belief that it is a bringer of bad luck. Nevertheless, when the possibility of a return match with another giant river stingray came up, my interest was tempered by
trepidation.

The short-tailed river ray,
Potamotrygon brachyura
, lives in the Paraná-Paraguay River south of the Amazon. According to the FishBase website, the species was described back in
1880. But the site gives a maximum size of only three feet and describes it as ‘harmless’. This is at odds with what I was now hearing: stories of a huge, club-tailed beast that
terrifies both mixed-race Argentineans and indigenous Guaraní. Although it is short in relation to its body, the ray’s tail is covered in thorny spines, which can rip flesh to the
bone. Near the tip are one or two barbed prongs, four inches long, which inject flesh-rotting venom. Human deaths, I was told, include a fifteen-year-old Guaraní girl stabbed in the abdomen
and a boy pierced in the thigh. Fishermen would rather cut their lines than go near it. As for its size, I was told of a 480-pounder caught in 2008 after a three-hour fight, and one weighing 572
pounds that was caught in 2002. The maximum weight could exceed 600 pounds.

I arrived in the town of Bella Vista after an overnight bus journey north from Buenos Aires through endless flat scrub. The river was far larger than I expected, splitting into multiple channels
that extended its width to four miles. But the profusion of low islands meant plenty of promising-looking spots: eddies and slacks where channels merged as well as deep holes where lakes and swamps
drained back into the river. I wasn’t going to take any chances with these fish, so I’d set up a 5½-foot shark rod coupled with thick 150-pound mono and a 7-foot coated wire
leader. To get the line out, I clipped it to a plastic water bottle, using strong elastic bands, and then floated it down the current before jerking it free. It worked perfectly, apart from one
thing: sometimes the bottle would dip and bob before I released the line, a sign that the giant gold-coloured piranhas, known as palometa, that infest these waters had eaten the bait. At other
times dorado (
Salminus brasiliensis
), a beautiful, leaping gamefish that resembles a gilded salmon – but in this context, a ‘nuisance’ species – would take it. I
clearly needed to change my approach, to get the bait down quickly into the realm of the bottom-feeders.

But even after I switched to an outfit that I could cast (a seven-foot rod with two hundred-pound braid and a shorter leader), the piranhas continued to find the bait, even after dark. Night
also brought striped catfish, known here as surubi. Although I’ve handled scores of these, I was holding a small one up for the camera when it kicked and stuck its pectoral spine into the
back of my left hand. The pain was excruciating, and I swore and swore. But it was a useful reminder: I could afford no such lapse of concentration when the stingray came along.

I also saw the scars, on feet and ankles. One young fisherman, Tingo, has been stung ten times. He says the pain is like holding your foot in a fire. One encounter was clearly with a very big
fish: when he jumped back after being hit, he stepped on another part of its body and got hit again. Later, when he hooked a 473-pounder on a line he had put out for surubi, he shot it three times
with a 9mm handgun before landing it. Tingo treated the wounds himself with hot sand. At the town hospital, they first inject local anesthetic and scrub the wound to remove dirt and dead tissue.
Then they bathe it in hot water, which breaks down the venom. An older fisherman, Peto, who didn’t treat a wound, says it didn’t fully heal for six years. The scar, on his left ankle,
feels hard to the touch and remains numb to this day. The worst-case scenario, however, if the necrosis sets in, is gangrene. At this stage, amputation may be the only way to save the
victim’s life.

This all helped to explain the small, dried-out stingray corpse I found with multiple stab wounds behind its eyes as well as the big ray that appeared one day, strung up on the waterfront, with
a bloody stump where its tail had been. I measured its diameter at forty-eight inches and, helped by four people, lifted it on to some scales. The needle went round to 194 pounds. With its tail,
guts and lost fluid, its live weight would have been about 215 pounds. Despite this animal’s reputation – and the fear it inspires – its death seemed such a waste. But perhaps I
would have felt less sentimental if I was not simply a visitor here. At any rate, one consolation was that I now had accurate data on its proportions. If I now caught a big one, I wouldn’t
need to subject it to the stress of being weighed before returning it to the river.

But catching a giant was looking less and less likely. I’d caught a solitary thirty-pounder on my fourth day, but this hardly qualified. How strange that stingrays often plagued me in
Brazil, when I wanted to avoid them, but now that I was targeting them, they were oddly elusive. As the days passed, I came under increasing pressure to change my approach, to carpet-bomb the river
with baits. But I don’t believe this necessarily improves one’s chances, and besides, I only had one suitably heavy-duty outfit. In the end though, as a token concession, I set up a
second outfit, a light boat rod with eighty-pound mono line.

On my last (tenth) day I went to a different type of spot: a fast, deep run, close to a snaggy bank. Three days before, a dorado fisherman had lost a stingray here, which probably never even
realised it had been hooked. I swung a swamp eel out on my big rod and a nine-inch knife fish slightly closer. At 2.05 p.m. the line on the lighter rod moved. I picked it up, felt a steady pull,
and then another. On setting the hook, I immediately knew it was a ray. There was a lunge, ripping line, and then it became solid, immobile, and yet animate. We pulled up the anchor and took up
position above it. Half an hour later, after no further movement, I was convinced it had swum round a sunken tree. I asked my boatman José to edge across the current a little so I could pull
from a different angle. The rod didn’t really have enough backbone, but when I locked the reel with my thumb and heaved, I felt a pulsing on the line and then a wrench. Then it was stalemate
again – or, rather, the growing certainty that the aches in my back and arms, growing more intense by the minute, were going to be for nothing. If I could lift it off the bottom, the current
might take us both downstream beyond the snaggy bank to a slack that lay off a sandy beach. But for two hours our position hardly changed. Then another desperate heave, with José expertly
holding the boat still in the current, got it moving again. Looking up, I saw that we were now adjacent to the sand. But the water was still deep. If we couldn’t pull it to the shallows here,
the ray would continue downstream and we’d never bring it up. For the first time, though, I got the sense that the weight on the line, although heavy, was tiring. The bow of the boat grated
against sand, and I jumped out. Then it materialised in front of me: a huge circular shape, humped in the middle and the same colour as the sand, veined with a network of dark shadowy lines. I
pulled on my stab-proof gauntlets and, taking it by the spiracles, heaved it aground as the tail and skirt thrashed, throwing wet sand in my face. The time was 5.55. Bringing it in had taken nearly
four hours.

At fifty-three inches across, I calculated its weight between 250 and 280 pounds – a squashed equivalent of the Queensland groper. But, being in the same genus as the ocellate stingray of
the Amazon (
Potamotrygon motoro
) and living six hundred miles from the ocean, there’s no doubt that this is a true freshwater species. So it’s a record, of some sort, for me. But
somehow, despite the numbers, a stingray doesn’t count. In my mind, and in appearance, it’s still an alien: a sea fish that strayed and then stayed.

I slid it back into the water, where its massive body dissolved, merging once more with the riverbed. All that remained were two dark eyes, opening and closing in a slow, pulsing rhythm. Then
they too were gone.