Jeremy Wade's Dark Waters

In a land dominated by rock and ice...

There is something very incongruous about this place. There's nobody here.

..beasts of all sizes thrive against the odds.

He's running, he's running.

But one species seems to have gone missing.

No-one knows where it's gone and no-one knows why.

I'm Jeremy Wade, fisherman and adventurer.

For more than 35 years, I've travelled the globe hunting for monsters...

Look at this beast.

..but mysteries are still out there.

There's something behind me.

I'm journeying into the unknown to reveal...

Yes!

..the secrets hidden in these dark waters.

I'm in Alaska,

home of the world's longest Pacific salmon runs.

Five species of Pacific salmon have navigated these waters for millennia.

But one salmon species is in a class of its own.

Bigger and faster than the rest

and famed for their incredible feats of endurance,

king salmon are the power athletes of the salmon world.

The word coming out of Alaska recently

is that the king salmon have gone missing.

Now, salmon are born inland in the rivers.

They then migrate down to the sea,

where they spend a number of years feeding and growing.

Then they return to the river where they were hatched

and they spawn and they carry on the life cycle.

But in the last few years, the kings have not been returning.

So what has happened to them?

The other four species of salmon in Alaska,

chum, pink, coho and sockeye, are doing fine.

So how can just one species of salmon disappear?

Who or what is taking the kings?

I'm starting my investigation on the Kenai River

in the south of Alaska.

Thirty years ago a fisherman landed a king salmon here

that weighed nearly 100lb.

This is the Kenai River.

Now, this used to be the place to come

and catch king salmon on rod and line.

Phenomenal numbers of fish. Also very big fish.

The world record came from here.

But the story is that today they've all but disappeared.

Having said that, there's loads of people here,

almost shoulder-to-shoulder, a rod-length apart, sometimes less.

And I guess they're catching something,

so I'm gonna go and find out what that is.

The Kenai is just a couple of hours' drive from Anchorage

and it's the most heavily fished river in all of Alaska.

- How's your day been? - They come in spurts.

Sometimes you get a bunch, bam, bam, bam, and then nothing.

Do you fish kings as well? Not any more. The fishing's so bad.

So you used to fish? Yes. Yeah. Used to fish the rivers for 'em.

They don't come back like they used to. Right.

So, in its heyday, what was it like?

I caught nine really nice kings in an afternoon.

But now that...that's totally unheard of. Absolutely.

He confirms what I've heard.

This famous salmon river seems to be empty of kings.

But there are other species here.

These fishermen are hauling out sockeye salmon,

which appear to be running strong.

Why have just the kings vanished?

If the problem was an environmental one,

then surely all the salmon species would be affected.

Sockeye salmon are particularly sensitive to any ecological changes.

So I'm hoping the sockeye can shed some light

on the health of this river.

It's a bit of a hybrid technique I'm using here.

I'm using a fly rod and reel, but on the end, I've got some lead

and a leader about four feet long.

Something like that, and then, on the end, quite a heavy, bright fly.

Now, no way can I fly-cast with those leads.

What I'm doing, I'm just swinging it out a short distance.

And the idea is that the leads will just bump on the bottom

and the line gets caught in the mouth.

And then this will slide along

and it'll hook them on the outside of the mouth.

I've never fished the Kenai before

and this is an unfamiliar technique for me,

but it's how most locals catch sockeye here.

Yes!

Surprising, even with the resistance of the rod,

it's making headway against the current.

There it is! Mind...Mind yourself, mind yourself.

And here it is, it's right in here.

Go on.

Wow.

It's strong. It's strong.

There it is.

So, sockeye salmon. The salmon are running.

As an indicator of clean water,

this decent-sized sockeye looks bright,

clear-eyed and bursting with energy,

which suggests water quality isn't the problem.

So could something be killing off the king salmon in large numbers?

One predator immediately springs to mind.

A thousand pounds of aggression with an insatiable appetite,

the brown bear is a salmon-eating machine.

I travel across the Cook Inlet

to see if I can find any evidence of bears over-indulging on king salmon.

I meet up with Matthias Breiter, an expert in bear behaviour.

He's come face to face with bears many times

in his 30 years of research, and he's not taking any chances.

That's a marine flare, so doesn't matter whether it gets wet.

And you pull it, and it shoots out a flame

about this long, smokes a lot, hisses, and it lasts about seven minutes.

And we've used it on bears

when they try to get into food caches,

and I've always been able to drive off bears easily with it. Right.

So that I don't wave my arms too much, can I put bug spray on my face? Yeah, that's fine.

This place is full of bears and they're all here for the salmon.

One, two, three, four, five. That's five over at that point.

So, this is a bay where a river meets the sea,

and at the moment it's round about high tide

and the tide is gonna start going out.

When that happens, there's gonna be,

erm, a number of small channels,

and any salmon that are here are likely to get stranded.

So that is what the bears are waiting for.

Bears need to eat up to 30 salmon a day

if they're to bulk up enough to survive through the winter.

He's running. This one's running, he's running,

it's running, it's running. Fishing has started, I think.

I'm so focused on the action in front of me

that I don't see what's coming from behind.

I'm in Alaska, in bear country.

I'm trying to find the famous king salmon,

but I'm caught off guard by a male brown bear.

There's a bear coming behind us..

They'll pretend to be not interested in us

and try to get closer and closer.

He's actually a good boy, walking around us.

So it's fishing time, yeah? Yeah.

Thankfully, the bears are far more interested in the fish than us...

..so we move closer to find out what kind of salmon they're feeding on.

It's hard to tell for sure, but they don't look big enough to be kings.

Do they go for kings if they're available?

Well, I'm sure they would

because the fat content is even higher. I've never seen it.

They spawn in water that is just simply

too deep for the bears to fish successfully.

In anything deeper than two feet, the bears really can't get the fish.

Yes. With kings, they tend to hug the bottom of the deep water,

and that's sort of beyond... Yeah. ..what the bears can fish in.

Yeah. So, if the bears get kings,

they are spawned-out ones that are dying. Right.

So that's not going to impact the spawning, then.

Of all that I've seen, I would say

that king salmon is the least impacted fish species.

With the kings swimming in water that's too deep to reach,

the bears can't be blamed for their disappearance.

But another predator has been hunting king salmon in Alaska

People.

I head into the heart of the state to the mighty Yukon River,

where indigenous people have been fishing for kings for 8,000 years.

They'll know king salmon better than anyone,

and they will feel the salmon's loss the hardest.

I land in Galena,

a small, remote community where the Yukon River

is an important source of food - in particular, king salmon.

Vehicles parked up. I'm not seeing any other vehicles on the road.

I haven't actually seen a person, either,

which is a bit odd, but I have been to other places

in the world where people do live...

a similar kind of subsistence lifestyle.

And what's going on is a lot of those people, they...

A lot of the time, they are not in the population centre.

They are out. They're on the land or they're on the water.

I'm lucky to find a ride upriver.

I'm guessing everyone is out fishing,

taking advantage of the salmon runs and stocking up for the winter.

But the river looks deserted.

It should be lined with fishing camps at this time of year.

I stop at a small village called Ruby

to see if there are any fishermen to speak with.

Hello.

People in the village have told me to talk to Billy McCarthy,

and he's down on his boat at the moment.

I believe this is him here.

Hello. Hey!

Billy is a native elder who has lived here all his life.

Nice meeting you.

I can remember as a young kid that there were so many fish.

Every fish camp along the river had racks of fish

and there was never a shortage.

Ruby depends very much on the king salmon. Right.

If the king salmon are not here, what happens to the village? What happens to the people?

Well, of course there's all sorts of fish out there...

..but to me, our main food is the king salmon.

They're gonna have a tough time.

It's a serious situation.

Subsistence fishermen only take what they need to feed their families,

which should protect their precious resource for future generations.

If the subsistence fishermen are not catching king salmon here

and if the bears are not eating them, what else could be wiping them out?

Morning. You started to pull 'em in.

- You got something in there? - Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.

Is this, sort of, a normal catch for a night?