River Monsters

In an African river there lurks a super predator .

A creature with the combined strength, speed and ferocity

of all the river monsters I have ever encountered...

... creating the most horrific yet perfect killing machine in all of the world's rivers .

Something bit this fish right in half.

My name is Jeremy Wade, biologist and extreme fisherman.

I'm on the trail of this terrifying monster .

And it's going to take all my skills as a fisherman to capture one.

Ripped By mstoll

This is a story from the heart of Africa ...

... of a cursed beast that preys on the unsuspecting .

Its powers are legendary,

its ferocity the stuff of nightmares .

On the banks of an African river, a young girl is playing.

She enters the water as she has done hundreds of times before.

Around her waist is a belt made from shiny bottle caps.

What she doesn't know is that today, in this spot, there lurks a monster.

A creature of terrifying appearance, like a relic from prehistoric times.

Armed with bone-crunching jaws as powerful as a hyena's,

it is as secretive as a crocodile and as deadly as a great white shark.

This super predator is only found in the most inaccessible part

of the most inaccessible river on Earth.

Very few outsiders have ever heard of it.

Even many of the locals have never seen it.

I'm heading to Central Africa, to the Congo River,

to track down and catch one of these elusive killers

to see if this creature really does deserve its reputation

as a supreme underwater predator .

The first thing a fisherman does when he goes to a new place is to check out the river.

But nowhere else in the world would you expect to be greeted by a sight anything at all like this.

This massive river is second only in flow and area to the Amazon,

draining a huge swathe of Africa half the size of the US.

That's the Congo River.

To reach this point it has run nearly 3,000 miles, crossed the Equator twice,

and narrowed from ten miles at its widest to around a mile here,

where it splits the two war-ravaged capital cities of Kinshasa and Brazzaville.

From here it plummets nearly 1,000ft in a series of rapids

to the Atlantic Ocean almost 300 miles away .

And wherever there is a river there are humans hard-wired to seek out its fish.

I meet up with Wedda, one of only a handful of fishermen that choose to fish these waters.

Lovely little miniature fish here.

Because this is a very delicate...

Yes, yes, yes, I've got two! I've got two!

Whoa! Look at this.

Because this is a very, very whippy bit of bamboo here,

you can actually feel these things going ding, ding, ding!

I got two.

Two fish. Look at that. My first fish in the Congo. Fantastic.

Kaki. These are the Kaki fish again.

That's exciting. It's always significant, your first fish.

It's hard to believe but many species of fish can survive fast-flowing rapids like these.

Wedda is one of only a handful of fishermen who choose to fish these waters.

I'm seeing what the local guys use here.

I'm slightly embarrassed using such gear, which is very expensive in comparison.

I actually think this will stand a chance of getting out large fish from here

which the bamboo and lighter line doesn't do, perhaps.

The creature I'm pursuing is a voracious predator...

There's the hook.

... that not only attacks the small fish these fishermen are after ...

... but will also take a chunk out of a crocodile .

It's the Goliath tigerfish .

Not just one of the top predators here,

but among the most ferocious freshwater predators in all the world's rivers.

Goliath tigerfish are said to grow six feet long

and weigh well in excess of 100lbs .

They have jaws packed with razor-sharp interlocking teeth.

And with their streamlined body and huge tail,

they are capable of incredible bursts of speed when striking prey.

Their ferocity when hunting is legendary .

The fishermen tell me there's someone I should meet

who has a unique way of fishing these waters .

This is Philippe Tenta .

He fishes these rapids ... with a net .

That is the scale of a goliath tigerfish which he caught the day before yesterday.

- Combien de kilo? - Trente kilo.

- Trente kilo? Ici? - Oui.

Whoo.

70lbs. Here. That's a big old tigerfish.

Teeth on it probably like that, you know, so...

Just the thought of that kind of fish in this kind of water.

You don't get much more extreme.

He's about to check his nets .

So you've got cable where it's going over the rocks.

Here we go. Here's the net coming in.

As would be expected, fishing with nets in such turbulent water is not without its problems.

The net's actually... It's stuck.

I have no idea what he plans to do about it .

But I wasn't expecting that .

Jumping into these waters is nothing short of suicidal.

But I realise now that this is something he must do on a daily basis.

If people call me an extreme fisherman, what does that make him?

I know he knows what he's doing

but to me it looks the most insanely dangerous way to make a living.

Swimming in this super-sized washing machine-type water,

with a net which is designed to catch things.

All this effort and there's actually nothing in this net.

We're just gonna redeploy a fresh net.

And it is just... just mind-boggling. You just wouldn't get me doing that.

That kind of fishing seems very reckless to me

but this is a country where people are forced to go to extreme lengths simply to survive.

Philippe tells me about a man whose father was attacked by a goliath tigerfish.

So I head to a suburb of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo,

to meet Jean-Pierre Montbeli, a fisherman with a story to tell.

He shows me a macabre souvenir,

a scale that he took from the massive goliath tigerfish that attacked his father.

It sounds like he was a specialist fisherman for tigerfish.

He was fishing on his own.

He didn't come back one day and...

They are known to jump out of the water. They're very fast.

They have just these wickedly sharp teeth .

Some time later, they found the boat, but with nobody in.

But there was a fish in the boat with a hook in its mouth.

When they looked, some distance away, his body was there as well.

The thing that's horrifying is it sounds like...

...there were marks on his father's throat.

It sounded like he was standing up in the boat.

A freak accident. It sounded like the fish jumped out of the water and bit him on the throat.

Montbeli's story raises a few questions .

But this is the second account of a goliath tigerfish attacking and killing a person.

I've come down to the market, which is something I always try and do.

The reason I do this is it's just such a great clearing-house for information

about boats, fishermen, and also about fish.

There's actually a fish in Africa called the African bony tonguebonytongue,

which is a relative of the Arapaima, which lives in the Amazon.

It's a bit like the way the piranhas are relatives of the goliath tigerfish here.

All this seems very strange, the fact you've got relatives living thousands of miles apart.

But it's all evidence of the fact that Africa and South America used to be joined.

It's a bit of an arms race down there .

In order to survive, the fish have had to get tooled up.

Sharp teeth, poisonous spines, and a bolt of electricity

are all mechanisms that have evolved .

- Makunga. - Makunga.

I'm starting to see some of the weird and wonderful fish from this river. Makunga, this one.

Argh!

Oooh!

Very toothy. Argh!

This is an electric catfish.

This is an electric catfish. It's still alive.

He got his finger in its mouth.

Ah, the tail. And that's OK?

OK. Ah!

But here... Zzzz!

OK, OK.

But to stand any chance of catching a goliath,

I need to head upstream to a less-densely populated part of the river.

I want to see for myself if this fish deserves its reputation as an indiscriminate killer.

Success in fishing is largely about preparation

and I use the journey north to begin the groundwork.

Catching the fish is about getting local intelligence.

There's no way you can get that without talking to people.

Where I'm going, they're not gonna speak English.

Having left the capital, not many will speak French.

So I'm brushing up on my Lingala, which is the language they speak on the Congo River.

It's the trade language that everybody speaks as well as the other little local languages.

The goliath tigerfish is the ultimate freshwater predator,

combining characteristics from all the other river monsters I've ever battled.

It has the bloodthirsty reputation of the piranha,

dentition more fearsome than the payara,

the cunning of the Wels catfish,

and the strength of the piraiba .

Add to that, the athleticism of the arapaima and a bony head to rival that of the alligator,

and it's clear I'm going to have to draw on all of my past experiences to catch one.

Basically, I've got some pretty serious treble hooks.

I'll be using this kind of wire.

If I used ordinary fishing line down to the hooks the goliath tigerfish will chomp through it

so I'm using this kind of stuff.

It's a breaking strain of 135lbs.

Just 100 miles upstream from Brazzaville we arrive in the section of river

where the young girl was attacked and killed by a goliath tigerfish.

But that was on the opposite bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And I don't have papers for the DRC .

With the country still experiencing unrest, I can't risk going there.

I stop and chat to some fishermen .

They show me a tiny goliath tigerfish that they have just caught.

It looks like a piranha but this is just a baby goliath tigerfish.

These things grow to the size of a person.

This confirms that it could be a good place to start fishing.

So we've got a lump of rock here, a cliff. Some boulders at the bottom.

The current comes down, gets deflected out into the middle.

And we've got this nice eddy here.

So I'm actually fishing off the back of the boat, letting the back current take it.

But it's classic ambush predator country.

I've got the bait about 50 yards down from the boat.

I'm feeling hopeful. Something could take that.

Fish on! Fish on!

Argh!

The bait went round the corner.

I lost sight of the float, I lost sight of the float.

And I just pulled on the line. I was retrieving it. Suddenly, there's a wrench on the rod.

Ah, look at that.

That's tigerfish.

There we go - chung, chung, chung.

It would have had a really good mouthful of that...

...of the hook as well.

But...

failed to get a good hook-up.

That fish was on for two or three seconds.

That's sort of par for the course with these fish.

But I'm just looking up the wire here.

You can see, as it was running away,