River Monsters (2009) s03e04 Episode Script

My name's Jeremy Wade.
For as long as I can remember, I've had a passion that verges on obsession.
Dangerous freshwater fish have got me well and truly hooked.
Their deadly reputations have always fascinated me as well as their methods of attack.
I think we've got one! In rivers around the world, I've seen everything from giant venom-coated stings to tiny assassins that drill into flesh.
I've held a fish that could slice off my arm, smelt the breath of a beast that inhales its victims whole and felt the hammer blow of an 80lb battering ram.
Yet of all the nasty devices I've come across, there is one murderous-looking weapon that really stands out.
It belongs to a sea monster that swims hundreds of miles up rivers.
A monster that has completely eluded me until now.
Fish on! Fish on! Nearly 20 years ago on my first fishing trip to the Amazon, I was in a hardware store looking for rope and other supplies when I caught sight of something that stopped me dead in my tracks.
It was about a yard long with a profile just like a chainsaw.
Except that each vicious looking point was fully two inches long.
What I had stumbled upon was the snout, or rostrum, of a fish the locals called the Araguagua.
This is an animal I had been vaguely aware of from my youth but which I'd never actually seen.
' In the comics and adventure books of my childhood, this creature was normally depicted as a sea monster.
Usually brandishing its serrated weapon at terrified skin divers.
But I don't ever remember seeing a picture of a real one.
And until that hardware store in Brazil, I had no idea that this large and wickedly armed fish might swim up rivers.
The animal in question is known in English as a sawfish.
Giants over 20 feet long have occasionally been caught.
Legend has it that these monsters will even attack boats.
In the 16th century, the Swedish chronicler Olaus Magnus states that this terrifying fish will, and I quote, "Swim under ships and cut them, that the water may come in and he may feed on the men when the ship is drowned.
" More recently a story from India talks of a man hacked in two.
If those accounts sound far-fetched, then more believable perhaps is this newspaper article from the 1930s about an attack off the coast of Florida.
The story goes that a fisherman harpooned a large sawfish in shallow water.
But when the brute spun round and struck the boat with its snout, the tables were suddenly turned.
I shudder to imagine that rack of teeth scything into human flesh.
Despite severe injuries, the victim in this instance appears to have survived.
But I have long wondered if the animal that attacked him could be the most fearsome of any fish to lurk in a river.
As I prepare to go in search of one, two questions are at the front of my mind.
Why is such a large sea-dwelling predator coming into freshwater? And is the sawfish as deadly as it looks? My desire to meet this monster may have started in the jungles of South America but that's no longer a place I can hope to find one.
In the two decades since I stared in horror at that fearsome weapon, sawfish have almost vanished from the face of the earth.
A fact that may explain why, in all my travels, I've never seen one in the flesh.
For the first time in all my adventures, I'm afraid that this time I might simply be too late.
Once common throughout the tropics, sawfish are now increasingly hard to find.
Commercial fishing in particular has taken a heavy toll.
Decades of overkill have almost wiped them out.
To track down this rare beast, I'm heading to Australia's wild North-West.
I've come to the remote Fitzroy River, one of the last strongholds of the so-called freshwater sawfish.
Somewhere here, so I've heard, lurks a creature barely changed since the Age of the Dinosaurs.
At the mouth of the river, I venture into unfamiliar territory.
This is a no man's land of shifting mud and treacherous currents.
But the dangers I can see are only half the picture.
Hidden below the surface are some of the world's most notorious man-eaters.
I've been granted special permission to try and catch the critically endangered sawfish.
This puts me in a truly privileged position.
Yet, in such a vast area, there's no guarantee I'll even find one.
Hundreds of square miles of open water.
It is ridiculous.
The warm, shallow water at the mouth of the Fitzroy is prime sawfish habitat.
20 years ago, a local fisherman snagged an 18-footer not far from here.
Pretty lively Yeah, that's something.
If I hadn't seen what was responsible for that, I might be getting quite excited now.
I might be thinking that's something toothy.
But that's crab claw marks.
Everything is hungry down here.
Out of the corner of my eye, I'm aware of a more sinister predator.
For a saltwater crocodile, humans as well as crabs are fair game.
This wouldn't be a good place to fall in.
There's something on there.
This time I'm hooked into something meaty.
It's only day one but I wonder if I'm about to get lucky.
That's actually running Back a little, back a little.
Back, back.
Here we go Just when I think it's in, the fish kicks off again and I grab my rod back for round two.
OK, hold it there.
Hold there, hold there.
I'm gonna take this easy because I can't actually I can't get a positive ID in the water.
Very muddy water.
Oh! It's a shark, it's a shark! This estuary's just full of predators.
Bull shark.
I keep well clear of its mouth.
Even a five-foot juvenile could bite my hand off.
The adults can reach 13 feet, and probably kill more people than any other shark.
This is one of the few sea dwellers which, like sawfish, can swim up rivers.
Well, that was a bit of drama.
I'm glad we got that in.
It's always exciting to get a fish like that in on light tackle.
But erm a bit of disappointment.
That's not the fish that I'm after.
I'm after something that looks quite similar to that.
So, I've got it all to do again.
Next time the line goes, I want it to be a sawfish not a bull shark.
Physically, sawfish resemble sharks quite closely.
They have shark-like dorsal fins, a long body and a high, sweeping tail.
In other ways, they are more like their true ancestors - rays.
The gills, for example, sit underneath.
The head is flat and the mouth is a narrow slit.
But it's the snout that intrigues me.
Despite its vicious profile, few have ever seen it in action.
Malcolm Douglas is an exception.
This real-life Crocodile Dundee has witnessed nature's very own chainsaw massacre.
In '67, I was up around Darwin and just as we came out of this creek in the morning, I saw something.
I saw a big school of mullet all cruising, and they're all sort of huddling together.
And I said to my mate, "Something's stressing those mullet.
" And, next thing, this massive saw came up between them and it just went, "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" Faster than a speeding bullet, as they say.
He came through gobbling them up, and he turned around again, and he did that several times.
We thought that was just the most fantastic thing that we ever saw.
The saw on that - I measured it from memory, - was around about eight foot long, massive.
- The saw? Yeah, The saw itself.
Yeah, it was huge.
I'm not exaggerating.
I'm not prone to exaggeration.
This high-spec weapon is stuffed with sensors that pick up, not just the movement of nearby animals, but also their electrical aura.
Even in total darkness, a sawfish can nail its target.
According to Malcolm, they also use their saw in self-defence.
- You nearly had a rack of those in your leg? - Yeah, not nice.
As the dry season comes on here, you get the Fitzroy gets very shallow, right.
These sawfish will hang round, quite often, in the shallow water.
Now, if you trap a sawfish between the bank and the deep channel, he will come at you with that saw, and he will just lash around.
This is his protection.
If you get hit in the leg or the arm or the stomach it's not a pretty sight.
It'd almost be worse than a crocodile bite, because it's a rip.
Right through.
Then they'd come back and hit you two or three times.
Right.
The dry season is the only time you can explore the Fitzroy River, at least by vehicle.
During the rains, all of this is under water.
I head to a deep channel known as Telegraph Pool.
By moving a few miles inland, I'm hoping to improve my chances of catching a sawfish.
Strong tides bring a lot of smaller fish into this lower section of the river, making it a rich hunting ground for large predators.
Some are already lining up.
With crocodiles, they say it's the ones you can't see that you have to worry about.
Hardly reassuring when they vanish without trace into muddy water.
We're just waiting for nightfall, but it's a good state of the tide as well.
The tide will be coming up soon, apparently the sawfish move up with the tide.
They move up with the tide and down with the tide.
So I've just got a couple of baits out.
Yeah, it's all looking very fishy at the moment.
A few locals also brave this spot.
Most are after barramundi, a sport fish prized for its fighting spirit.
In general, though, anglers want to avoid sawfish, which can rip lines as well as flesh.
To boost my chances, I've set up two rods.
By sunset, my baits are still untouched, and as darkness falls, the mood grows more sinister.
It's not just the crocs that are making me edgy.
People have lived here for tens of thousands of years and their spirits seem to haunt the shadows.
With each passing hour, I feel more like a trespasser in someone else's world.
Daylight comes as a relief.
And then brings an unexpected breakthrough.
- Do you want a hand with that? - Yeah, please! Another fisherman, up early before the heat of the day, has accidentally hooked a sawfish.
This two-footer is a mere pup, but an extra pair of hands still doesn't go amiss.
- Were you fishing for these, or? - No, barramundi.
- I've caught everything but! - Right.
- It's certainly the first one of these I've seen.
- OK.
I'm out of range now, it's only a small one.
This baby sawfish is the monster in miniature, and my first chance to get a safe look at this bizarre animal.
Wow! Right, that's the first one of these I've seen.
Imagine one of these things 20-foot long, which is what they grow to when they get in the sea.
Yeah, so just like a shark, if you look at the back end of it.
Come forward that's just like a ray's mouth, a stingray's mouth.
But that is the unique feature.
And even on a small one like this, just look.
That's quite a fearsome weapon.
Erm And actually although this is a small one, a very good thing to see because for fish like this to exist - and this is probably about a year old - there have to be breeding size adults around.
Fantastic.
I wish I'd caught it myself! I'm here to catch a monster, but for now I just want to return the pup unharmed.
Just moving the tail to get the circulation going a bit.
Sawfish travel more than 200 miles up the Fitzroy river deep into the arid Australian outback.
I want to know why they swim so far into fresh water and how dangerous they are to humans.
The Aborigines have lived with these predators for at least 50,000 years.
Sawfish feature in their tribal dances and in one of their dreamtime stories, the animal uses its huge saw to gouge out the rivers of the land.
I'm now over 150 miles from the coast and on my way to meet some of Bunuba tribe.
They call this stretch of river Darngku, or Deep Water, and I can see why.
The white band along the cliffs is a stark warning of how far this river rises during the rains.
For 30 feet above me, the rocks have been scrubbed clean.
With help from the Bunuba, I'm hoping to catch my first sawfish.
But I also want to find out from them how dangerous it really is.
Since coming here, I've already picked up one story of an attack, from Northern Australia.
Back in the 1940s, a large sawfish first ripped itself out of a net, then pursued the fishermen's boat.
As they fled in their dinghy towards the shore, it seems that two of the men were knocked overboard into a potentially deadly situation.
What spooks me about this story is not the men's injuries incredibly, they escaped virtually unscathed.
But according to the report, the boat's solid wooden hull was punctured by the animal's teeth, such was the force of one of its blows.
If a sawfish can punch a hole in a boat, I can't help wondering what its teeth could do to me.
At least there's no danger here from saltwater crocodiles.
Few of them ever come this far up river.
In a landscape like no other and with a good two hours of daylight left, the temptation to stop and fish eventually gets the better of me.
This river is full of predators which, like the sawfish, come up from the sea.
And there's one in particular I'd really like to have a look at.
The barramundi is an ambush hunter that lurks near the bottom of the river then bursts up to snatch its prey.
To provoke a strike from this fish, anglers often use a brightly coloured lure, worked near the surface over deeper water.
By perching on an island of rock, I can cast into a wide area of river.
But steep sides and jagged surfaces mean I don't have much room for manoeuvre.
This feels quite a good weight.
Very, very sharp rocks, these.
There it is, there it is.
I just see a flash - there it goes.
Oops! Clambering over here Barramundi.
Lovely.
Not bad for 20 minutes' work.
Spiky old dorsal fin on there, that's why you've got to be a bit careful handling these.
Also there's a very, very sharp - razor sharp bit of bone just in front of the gill flap there.
Plus I had all the hooks to extract on this very precipitous bit of sharp limestone here.
But here we go.
Fish in safely, barramundi.
And just what a spectacular setting to catch it from.
The Aborigines have long hunted sawfish for food and are still allowed to catch them.
As an outsider, though, I'm not sure how they'll take to me fishing for one in their waters.
Around here, it's mostly the women who do the fishing, so it's their knowledge I want to tap into.
Mary Aitken is an elder from the Bunuba tribe.
She grew up on this river, and begins by recounting the story of a large sawfish that she caught here many years ago.
How many were you? It seems the fish was almost too big for the back of Mary's pick-up.
So you just got it on? So what about children when they go fishing here? They're catching small fish and then they get one of these big sawfish on the line.
Do they ever get hurt by them? Then Mary hands me the largest saw I've ever seen.
The savage potential of this readymade weapon certainly hasn't been lost on humans.
There are records of sawfish rostrums being used as weapons right across the Western Pacific.
From the Philippines down through New Guinea, as far as New Zealand.
They'd use it to slice open the abdomens of their enemies and also to open up the veins on the inside of the elbows causing fatal bleeding.
And even just a couple of years ago, here in Australia, a couple of burglars attacked a man in a caravan using a sawfish rostrum and they put him in hospital.
But whether the sawfish itself sets out to attack people is less clear.
So far the evidence is about as shadowy as the beast itself.
By mid dry season, the Fitzroy has sunk from a raging torrent into a series of quiet pools, with little or no moving water.
This ought to concentrate the sawfish and make them easier to find, but before I go looking, I'll need plenty of fresh bait.
With a casual throw of the net, Mary shows me the local technique for catching small fish.
So there's a bit of effort goes into this fishing, isn't it? You don't just turn up and get a line out.
It's a method I've seen people use all round the world but have never tried myself.
- What's that? Is that a brim or something? - Yep.
The theory could hardly be simpler.
Cast a circle and your net covers the greatest possible area, thus snagging more fish.
With fresh bait on her line, Mary is quickly into her fishing.
Meanwhile I'm getting into a bit of a muddle.
That was a square! After a slow start, I finally won some respect, and Mary lets me in on a few good fishing spots along the gorge.
Sawfish have roamed the earth for at least a hundred million years, yet the rocks under my feet are nearly four times this old.
My walkabout takes me to the top of a limestone cliff, the remnant of a once mighty barrier reef that lay beneath an ancient ocean.
Beyond the horizon, parts of this continent date back four billion years.
That's almost as old as life itself.
I'm looking looking for a stretch of water with a deep channel - the kind of place where a big sawfish might lie up.
I've got the whole river to myself, and with limited time, I'm eager to get fishing.
This is about as simple as fishing gets, I suppose - just using a hand-line.
There's the hook down in the water, with a little bit of lead holding the bait in place, and this end - just a winder.
This is what the locals use, so I'm just giving it a go.
They'll tend to go away and come back and check the line, after a couple of hours - make sure it's fastened to something.
They look a bit askance at me sitting actually holding the line but I've got a limited time here.
I want to feel when something comes along, make sure the hook sets.
But from their point of view, I'm wasting energy and sitting out in the sun unnecessarily.
All that remains now is to sit and wait for something to find the bait.
As the hours slip by, I try out several spots along the river.
By mid afternoon, the only animals I've managed to flush out are a bunch of cockatoos.
Surprisingly the shallow pools are still full of life, even in the dry season there are plenty of shrimp and brim to be found.
This will be good ammunition for later.
As I return to camp, I wonder if the abundance of food might explain why sawfish come so far up river.
If the pickings are rich enough and you can adapt to fresh water, then why not? Recently in South Africa, I caught huge adult bull sharks which were swimming way into fresh water for just this reason.
But if the same is true of sawfish, then why aren't I hearing stories of giant 20-foot river monsters? It occurs to me that even here, in what's thought to be one of their last strongholds, these prehistoric beasts could be vanishing.
Perhaps darkness will draw a sawfish out of its lair.
It's often said they're more active at night.
Just in case I doze off, I tie an empty can to the line.
Should anything run off with the bait, the noise of it moving will wake me up.
I'm over 150 miles from the mouth of the river here but apparently in the past, according to Mary, there have been some big sawfish caught from this very place.
A long day baking in the outback sun has left me exhausted.
But my overcooked brain refuses to switch off.
I still have little sense of how dangerous sawfish are to people.
Back in that hardware store 20 years ago, the answer seemed obvious.
Yet for such a large and viciously-armed beast, I'd have expected a lot more bad press.
Especially from populated areas where sawfish were once common.
After all, this is a fish said to have hacked a man in two.
After a day of fishing without success, darkness has finally brought me a bite.
My bare hands take the strain as I wind in the line, but the fish on the end is not what I'm expecting.
Bull shark! A bull shark this far inland is a real eye-opener.
These aggressive fish are clearly thriving here, even during the dry season when this part of the river is little more than a stagnant pond.
So, a pretty hostile environment.
You can see why everything in there, basically, is tooled up.
The sawfish possibly needs that weaponry for defence.
Who knows? Anyway, I'd better put this back.
I'll just hope I don't hook him up again.
Even though I know bull sharks come up, you know, into fresh water you know, it's still really strange seeing them here.
But the monster I'm after is nowhere to be seen.
It was only recently that outsiders realised there were sawfish in this river, and began to study them.
I'm leaving Darngku and heading 100 miles back downstream to hook up with a small sawfish research team.
Perhaps their knowledge can help me in my quest.
I turn off the main highway to a dusty outpost called Camballin, and then follow a dirt track to an abandoned irrigation dam.
For most of the year, this man-made barrier stops sawfish swimming upstream.
They accumulate below the dam, making this an ideal spot for the research team.
Doctor Dave Morgan, who leads the research, is passionate about sawfish.
By tagging and tracking individual fish, he's starting to build up a picture of their secret lives.
But as we head out to set trapping nets, we're busy watching our backs.
Crocodiles seem to be following our activity with a predatory interest.
This is risky work.
If you get too focused on the crocs and take your eye off what's under your nose you can wind up getting karate chopped by a sawfish in the net.
Just trying to do it from a boat in a deep section, that's when you often get hit a lot.
Or when you don't want to get out of the boat because there are crocodiles or saltwater crocodiles around then yeah, you get hit.
Working as fast as we can, we lay a series of nets across the main channel.
If there are any sawfish here, they stand a good chance of getting snagged.
At regular intervals throughout the night, we come back to see if anything has turned up.
There's a float down here.
OK The first catch of the night is an agitated barramundi.
As I already know, this can be a prickly customer.
It has got itself well wrapped up, but eventually we manage to untangle it without getting impaled.
Barramundi got caught in the net, this is going back in the water.
This thing is quite a vicious predator, but this is going to be a meal for the crocs if it stays in the net any longer.
Back to fight another day.
No sawfish.
Still no sawfish.
There are more nets to check.
The problem now is the struggling barramundi has stirred up the crocs.
And just the thought of being grabbed by one of them is making me jumpy.
There's something - Hang on, there's something grey in the water.
Yeah, definitely.
There's a real kick, kick, kick, like that.
Can you see that? Croc, bull shark or sawfish, this has to be the lucky dip from hell.
Just be careful, mate.
It could be It could be a bull shark or a fresh water, salt water crocodile.
They get wrapped in the nets? They come and take the fish out the nets? The freshies generally go for the catfish but the salties definitely prefer the barramundi.
I'm starting to wish I was somewhere else.
They'll chew them in the nets and try and fight you for them.
Oh Shall I attempt to grab that? Is that Well, no sawfish in the net but this is a bull shark.
OK.
I'd normally be fired up to find bull sharks so far upstream in fresh water.
But they're starting to feel like a plague and I wonder how many more I might have to pull out from this crocodile soup before I find a sawfish.
I'm told that the annual flood was lower than normal this year, making it hard for sawfish to move upstream.
At any rate, the last nets are all empty.
With cruel irony, daylight brings the threat of an unseasonal storm.
Out here in the bush, heavy rain can spell trouble.
The timing is absolutely crucial.
If I was here in the wet season, I'd be sitting under water, which is why we come now in the dry season.
Not only is the river accessible, but also the fact that it's down about 30 foot, the fish are more confined.
The problem is that the weather, actually, is changing.
There's the wind blowing, we had rain last night, and there's concern at the moment that if there's any more rain, the tracks leading in are going to become impassable.
So, everyone's keeping an eye on the weather.
If things turn bad, we're going to throw everything in the vehicles and get out of here, and that will be a premature end to my mission.
With a big storm approaching, the research team has no choice but to beat a retreat.
Yet it seems there is still a glimmer of hope.
To stay one step ahead of the weather, we head back to Telegraph Pool.
This is my last chance to catch the monster that I've waited nearly 20 years to see.
While Dave and his team prepare for another night of trapping, I return, superstitiously perhaps, to the exact spot where I released the baby sawfish.
Maybe this is where my prayers will finally be answered.
Fish on! Fish on! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is a beast that means business, and it doesn't feel like a shark.
Good size, good size.
It's coming in quite close.
I'm gonna get it on these rocks in here.
I'm gonna need someone to grab it.
I think that's ready.
It's ready.
I think.
Oh! It's a sawfish, it's a sawfish! At last, the animal that's been swimming around in my head for nearly 20 years.
Here we go.
My first sawfish.
Look at this for a beast.
This thing is nearly seven foot long, it's bigger than I am.
And that rostrum on there - that's a foot-and-a-half long.
It's got 39 of those teeth.
Each one is about an inch long, wickedly sharp.
You've got that huge dorsal fin, a very big second dorsal fin, a very big tail and they anchor the body.
When the body flexes, it's this head and this rostrum that really scythe from side to side.
It's about to tense.
We're about to have a splash.
Yeah.
Here we go! Yeah! This journey began almost 20 years ago.
In the heart of the Amazon, I stood staring at a vicious looking weapon and wondered if I would ever see its owner in the flesh.
Now, in a remote river in Australia, I have finally got my hands on a live sawfish.
The scientists meanwhile, think they have figured out why these creatures come into freshwater.
Flat on the rostrum Dave's latest measurements show they are using the Fitzroy as a nursery.
Acoustic tag going in here.
Despite all the predators, it is still safer here than in the sea.
Only when they reach eight or nine feet long do sawfish leave the river.
As an adult living in salt water, this fish could one day become a 20-foot giant.
But I came here to find out if this fish is also a monster in terms of deed.
Now, there's no doubt that that fearsome, toothed rostrum is potentially a lethal weapon.
And it has certainly been used as such in the hands of humans.
But I can find just no instance at all of this fish having attacked a human being wilfully.
In other words, its monstrous appearance is not matched by its behaviour.
Certainly, if you're a small fish, this thing is a deadly weapon.
But from the human point of view, the sawfish is the archetypal gentle giant.
If anything, these vicious-looking creatures seem to be more sinned against, than sinners.
The thing is with these fish, it's always the weaponry that the attention is drawn to - the rostrum with all those teeth.
But actually, looking at the rest of this fish, this animal has been in the wars, it's been on the receiving end of quite a bad injury.
There is a big bit of its pectoral fin here missing.
That's a very clean, curved cut, slightly raw as well which suggests it's fairly recent.
And that would be a bull shark.
Look at that.
A saltwater crocodile thought it would have an easy meal.
The teeth just bounced off that hide.
So this is not just an animal with a very fearsome weapon on the end of its snout, it's really tough as well.
I mean, it just shrugged off that attack.
It really is a rough, tough environment down there, and it does seem that you need to be tooled up in some way just in order to survive.
The tragedy for this fish is that, in a world full of nets, the very weapon it needs to survive is now liable to get it snagged and killed.
My only fear as it swims away, is that we may be seeing the last of these ancient and extraordinary monsters.