My name is Jeremy Wade.
I'm an explorer and fishing detective.
I'm always on the lookout for mysterious fishy tales
that don't quite add up.
Careful! Careful! Careful!
This is a big one.
And one such story that I've just heard about
from the far wild east of Russia has really snagged my interest.
A fishing trip gone horribly wrong.
Three men mysteriously disappear
on a remote and wild river in Russia.
It has all the hallmarks
of a classic "River Monsters" investigation...
Telltale clues that this was not
just a simple fishing accident.
I believe they encountered something in the water,
something big enough and terrible enough
to cause the death of not just one man...
but of all three.
October 2009,
the Amur River in the far wild east of Russia.
Three men set out on a fishing trip.
It's the kind of trip they've made many times before.
Only this time, it's different.
This time, they never return.
A year later, the bodies of two of the men are found...
Or what's left of them.
Long dead, apparently drowned.
The third body is never recovered.
Over the years,
there have been many rumors of disappearances,
deaths, and monsters connected with the Amur River.
But it's impossible to get any more information.
It's as if there's something in the water
that they don't want the outside world to know about.
So I've had nothing concrete to go on...
until now.
Russia is a place I've never been to before.
It's the largest country in the world,
and the Amur is the world's 10th longest river.
At 2,700 miles,
it's nearly twice as long as the Colorado.
The region is home to some of the largest land predators...
Tigers and bears.
But what's in the river?
Legend has it the river was carved out
by a huge black dragon
as it dragged its body from the sea.
And something still lurks in its depths,
killing fishermen to this day.
I want to find out what it is.
What I need are facts.
And after three days of traveling,
I arrive at the town of Nikolayevsk
near the river's mouth.
Once a wealthy place,
it's now more like a ghost town.
I'm looking for details
of what exactly happened to those three fishermen.
In this remote location where few outsiders travel,
getting information is not going to be easy.
So I go fishing...
At a small feeder stream on the outskirts of town.
People in isolated communities can be suspicious of strangers,
so I'm using myself as bait.
Oh! Oh!
To see if the novelty of an outsider
might tempt somebody to talk.
I... I think I just briefly hooked something.
But I don't want to strike too early
and reveal that it's information I'm after...
Not until I've gained their trust.
This one.
Okay, blue fox.
Okay. Thank you.
Fishing for me is often about thinking outside the box.
My efforts are rewarded.
I get an invitation to join them inside their home,
but first, I want to prove
that I'm capable of bringing a fish in.
Whoa.
But wherever I fish,
I seem to run into competition I wasn't expecting.
Hey! Hey! Hey! I've got a dog here.
No! No! No! No! No! No!
In the Amazon,
I've had to compete with caiman for the fish on the line.
And in Alaska, a bear took my fish.
But a dog is a first.
Well, I don't want a dog with a hook in its mouth.
That would not be... That would not be fun.
What a lovely fish... A lovely chum salmon.
Beautiful coloration, pink band down the side,
those dark spots on the back.
I'm told this river is stuffed with salmon.
Interesting.
I think you're starting to see that sort of metamorphosis
that they undergo when they come in the rivers,
that sort of hook on the lower jaw,
hump of the back there.
A lot of the locals are keeping these for the pot.
I think while nobody's looking
I might slip this one back, though.
This catch is significant,
because no monster can exist without a food supply.
This abundance of salmon would fulfill that role.
I join Egor Poroshan and his friends inside to warm up.
And as we talk,
I'm hoping I'll get the information
I have come here for.
Does anyone know of the fishermen who disappeared?
Other fish?
After some general fishing chat,
Egor tells me a key fact about the three men who vanished.
Well, I've managed to find out a little bit more.
The fishermen actually weren't from here.
They were from a town a little way further up the river.
With some borrowed transport,
I head west to the town of Innokentyevka.
With fewer than 5,000 people,
this fishing community is one of just a handful
along this stretch of the Amur.
There's a tough mix of races and cultures
all brought together for one reason... fish.
With such a small population,
it shouldn't be too hard
to find someone who knew the fishermen.
The man I meet is a Neve,
one of the many tribes of indigenous people
who originally inhabited this region.
His name is Eduard,
and his cousin was one of the fishermen who died that day.
Treading gently, I ask about what happened.
His cousin went fishing with two other people
a couple of years ago, and, uh, they disappeared.
Two bodies were actually found the next year.
The other person hasn't been found.
Very quickly,
I eliminate some of the more obvious possibilities.
So, this really sounds like something
that doesn't have an easy explanation.
One of the guys on the boat was inexperienced.
It was his first time out,
but the other two people were very experienced,
knew what they were doing.
The boat was designed to be on that kind of water.
It was a sea-going boat,
and the weather was nothing out of the ordinary.
And, uh, three people somehow disappeared.
I ask what they were fishing for,
and he's curiously evasive.
They were clearly not fishing for salmon.
This strange conversation leaves me
with more questions than answers.
I get the feeling that something's being concealed.
Can you show me where it happened?
He does, however, agree to show me on the map
where they would have been heading.
Well, he's shown me where it happened.
I think what I've got to do now
is actually get out on the river.
My investigation needs to be thorough.
Once all the obvious possibilities
have been crossed off,
I can take a hard look at the suspects in the water.
And since I've never fished here before,
I've no idea what's down there.
Well, this is pretty much where the boat went down,
and just looking around,
this isn't the open sea, this is the mouth of the river.
It's relatively sheltered.
Not only that, I'm thinking
that if the people on board were even semi-competent swimmers,
they would have had half a chance to reach the shore.
The knowledge of these fishing grounds
would have been handed down through generations.
There was something else involved...
Not just the weather and the water.
So, what they were fishing for has to be somehow responsible.
Some fishermen have just stopped by,
and they've got something in a net they want me to see.
They've asked not to have their faces shown,
further evidence that something suspicious is going on here.
Perhaps they were poaching, but what for?
This is a seal that's got drowned in the net.
I wasn't expecting this.
I had it in my mind that I was about to see a fish,
but could a seal be the monster of the Amur River?
Bearded seals average 600 pounds.
Tangled and thrashing in a net,
they are easily big enough to drag a careless fisherman
to his death.
So, there's lots of them around, apparently,
but mainly out in the mouth of the river.
I ask if seals cause fishing accidents.
They reply that they've never heard of that happening.
The thing about nets is they are quite, sort of, indiscriminate.
I mean, they're obviously fishing for a large animal
the size of those meshes.
Far too big for salmon.
So, if they weren't trying to catch seals or salmon,
then what were they fishing for?
Again, I can't seem to get an answer.
On the surface, people are helpful,
but on another level, no one is talking.
This place has a veil of secrecy
that I need to penetrate.
Fish markets usually provide me with information.
With none around, I head, instead,
to the fish processing plant.
The vast salmon populations
have drawn not just predators like seals to the Amur River,
but people, as well.
And everyone's involved,
young and old, every race and culture in the whole area.
But instead of finding answers, my suspicions only deepen.
People are friendly enough,
but again, no one seems to want to give anything away.
Just what is going on?
So, once again, I use myself as bait
to try and gain their trust.
There are fish off the factory's dock,
but I'm not seeing any monsters.
It's not quite.
It's a bit roach-like, about 4 or 5 ounces.
And it was caught on a hook
with a little bit of silver paper attached.
Finally, the plant's manager
tells me of a fish that lives just off the dock,
a fish big enough to destroy fishermen's tackle,
so it's never been caught.
I take up the challenge.
If this story is right, I'm not taking any chances.
I'm using my monster rod, a wire trace,
and line with a breaking strain of 200 pounds.
This place would certainly appeal to a monster...
An easy, vast, and ready supply of fish scraps
to feast upon.
But with all this free food,
will it find my offering appealing?
A bite.
It's another surprise.
I'll try and swing this in.
Basically, putting a lump of dead fish
out by the waste shoot at the fish factory,
and I'll just see if I can just swing this in.
That's a catfish.
That looks incredibly like a wels catfish,
but wels catfish don't exist out here.
But that looks like a very close relative anyway.
Um, wels catfish grow very big... 200 pounds or so.
If these things grow to that kind of size,
that could be the culprit.
That could be the fish we're looking at.
I've caught giant wels catfish from the river Ebro in Spain.
Fish so big, they nearly pulled me into the river.
So, this is a predator,
and the reason it's hanging out here, I guess,
is because of all the food, all the dead fish.
And with the annual run of salmon every year, I don't know,
it's possible that this species
could grow to an interesting size.
It turns out that there are two species of catfish
living in the Amur,
and one is potentially a true river monster.
Called the Soldatov catfish
after a famous Russian fish biologist,
it's said to grow to a similar size
as those infamous wels catfish from Europe
that I've investigated before.
But very little is actually known about it.
Could a giant catfish,
fattened on the fish waste from this plant,
be the monster of the Amur?
But it's nice to catch a fish,
and a predatory fish, out of this river.
I've little doubt that what lives here
and smashes the fishermen's tackle
is a giant, overfed one of these.
But is it responsible for the disappearance
of three fishermen?
To get more information,
one of the lads tells me about a man called Misha.
He's a hunter and fisherman,
and I'm curious to know what he thinks
about the possibility of a supersized catfish.
This is a story that Misha heard about on the river here.
There were two fishermen, went out netting one day.
Nothing out of the ordinary about that.
But what happened is
that they got a very big fish in their net,
and he says this was about 700 kilos,
about 1,500 pounds... Very large fish.
And they were trying to pull the net in with the fish in it,
so they were over one side of the boat.
This fish was so big that it actually flipped the boat
and they fell into the cold water.
This was in late autumn,
and the water was so cold that they actually died.
It's the conclusive evidence I needed
that there is a fish big enough here to drown fishermen.
And he says it's a very big fish,
this one, about 1,500 pounds,
a very powerful fish, and it's got a big mouth.
1,500 pounds is a colossal size.
Can you give me some more details of this fish?
Can you describe it to me?
But the fish he's describing is not a catfish.
It's something else entirely.
What he's saying is that in body shape,
it's very reminiscent of a shark,
even though we're talking about a fish here
that lives up rivers.
He says, especially the tail.
That is quite shark-like.
But it's got, running down its back and down its sides,
it's got rows of spikes, and he says they're very sharp
and you can hurt yourself if you come into contact with those.
And it's got a big mouth.
This is a predatory fish that normally feeds on other fish...
On smaller fish.
And it's also got these feelers hanging from its snout.
And I put all of that together, and to me, that says sturgeon.
It doesn't sound like any sturgeon
I've heard about before.
This fish they had in the net, what kind of fish was it?
Finally, I have a name for my culprit... kaluga...
A monster fish that has killed fishermen in the past.
Could the three men have been drowned
trying to wrestle a huge sturgeon into their boat?
A 1,500-pound monster
would surely be the fish of a lifetime.
But can I catch one?
At least now that I know what I'm after,
I can prepare accordingly.
Sturgeon have long, sensitive nasal feelers.
So rather than a wire trace,
I use a thin, super-tough, braided line
that's harder to detect.
From my previous sturgeon fishing experience in the U.S.,
I know that fish... Well, not just sturgeon...
All fish will hang out in deep water.
If you got a scoop on the bottom,
you tend to get food with the current coming down
and it deposits at the upstream end.
It sort of tumbles around in a sort of a vertical eddy.
And that's the place where any fish would naturally hang out
to intercept food coming down.
Out here on this fast river, the dangers are tangible.
It's incredibly deep,
and the current is stronger than it looks.
It's a place that can and has swallowed up fishermen
and left little trace.
Bump on the bottom in a sec.
I can just feel that bumping on the bottom.
Bump. Bump.
Sturgeon have been on earth for 200 million years
and have hardly changed since the time of the dinosaurs.
Individuals can live as long as 100 years.
Knowing what I know about sturgeon,
I'm preparing for anything.
I've caught a 300-pound white sturgeon in Oregon
which took me over half an hour to get in.
White sturgeon are huge,
but kaluga apparently can get even bigger.
There we go. There we go.
White sturgeon can weigh an enormous amount,
but kaluga, apparently, can weigh even more.
The biggest kaluga on record
tipped the scales at a staggering 2,205 pounds,
bigger than the heaviest recorded white sturgeon.
They have the potential
of being the biggest river monster of all time.
But to catch one,
I'm going to have to change the tactics
I'd normally use for hunting sturgeon.
Most sturgeon species have a mouth
shaped for feeding on the bottom.
But the kaluga is unique in the sturgeon world.
It's an active predator.
With a forward-opening mouth, it hunts salmon and other fish,
engulfing them in its cavernous jaws.
I'm just gonna try something a bit different.
I'm gonna try an artificial lure.
Because the kaluga is a predator,
it eats small fish,
I put something on, which...
Well, that's gonna vaguely resemble something alive
down there on the bottom.
It's sort of a caricature of a fish, this, really.
I'm gonna let it fall down to the bottom,
and we're gonna drift with the current.
And I'm just gonna lift the rod up and down.
And so this is just gonna flutter, particularly this tail.
It's gonna flutter in the water.
And it should attract... just the movement and the vibration.
It's the kind of thing that will attract the attention
of a predator.
Suddenly, it strikes me
that there are no other fishermen out here,
and now I find out why.
River police.
I'm politely told that fishing for kaluga is illegal.
If I had caught anything,
I'd have been in serious trouble.
Just as I'm starting to make headway in this investigation,
this is a real blow.
Here, there's no concept of catch and release.
I have to stop fishing.
This would explain why people haven't been talking.
They were breaking the law.
Why are people willing to risk their freedom
just to catch a fish?
To unravel this mystery,
I go to talk to the head
of the wildlife protection authority in this region.
His name is Valentin.
Good day.
Can you tell me, are there many in the river?
He tells me the Amur was once full of these giants.
The situation in the Soviet area
is that there was a ban on fishing for kaluga.
But in the '90s with the collapse of the USSR,
this region saw something of a free-for-all.
And apparently, kaluga came under relentless attack.
The kaluga has nearly been wiped out.
Why is it that people keep fishing for them?
What makes it so valuable, so attractive to the poachers?
Just getting my head around the numbers here.
The thing that's driving this whole situation
is the eggs of the kaluga.
This is a type of sturgeon, and it carries caviar.
About 13% to 14% of the body weight of a mature fish,
a female fish, is caviar.
Apparently, today in Moscow,
one kilo, two pounds of caviar
are gonna bring in about 500 U.S. dollars.
To a fisherman, this is like striking gold.
For a salmon fisherman here,
just one kaluga could bring them the same money
as working for 3½ years salmon fishing.
So, I mean, you can absolutely understand the temptation.
And given this level of motivation,
Valentin is just not optimistic at all
about the future of kaluga in this river.
It does seem very much as if the fish here is doomed.
Later, I find out just how bad this problem really is.
Because of the high value of caviar on the black market,
poaching is run by mafia-style organized crime.
People wouldn't talk
because they were scared of the repercussions.
Could the three fishermen who disappeared
have come across one of the last giants
and in the ensuing battle, lost their lives?
And perhaps the biggest question...
Are there any kaluga sturgeon left in the Amur at all?
I'm finding myself in a difficult situation.
I want to see if there are any monsters out there,
but the kaluga is protected.
There's a possible way around this.
People here have said
that I could go and catch one by accident,
but, technically, this would be poaching,
even though I'd be putting the fish back alive.
But to catch one like this would be morally wrong.
I'm halfway around the world.
I've got the boat, I've got the fishing gear,
I've got the food... Everything I need...
And I'm just so reluctant to give up,
having come this far.
So, I've been looking into ways,
is there any way I can just circumvent this?
And I think I found the way.
Valentin has put me in touch with a team of scientists here
monitoring fish stocks on the Amur.
They've allowed me to join them.
This is my only chance of seeing a kaluga...
If, of course, there are any left.
But the first thing I witness is not a fish
but clear proof that poachers
haven't given up on trying to find kaluga.
Two boats going at high speed
one after the other on the other side.
And apparently that is a police boat
chasing some poachers.
And at the moment,
I think the poachers are getting away.
The distance between the two boats is lengthening.
The thing about the value of caviar
is that with the profits that you make,
you can afford a faster boat than what the police have got.
Out here on this vast river,
trying to catch anything is going to be hard enough,
but something as rare as a kaluga
is going to be almost impossible.
But then, they say that about many fish I go in search of.
A lot of people who fish with line all the time
have this idea that fishing with nets is very easy.
You just put the nets out, and you empty out the river.
But it's actually quite technical.
If there's trees, other snags on the bottom,
they'll catch onto those,
but also, on the boat, you're feeding it out.
It can catch onto bits of the boat,
hence the cloth there,
but also bits of clothing, as well...
Buttons, things like that.
I'm only allowed to do this
because I'm with a licensed scientific team.
But as we wait for a chance encounter
with one of these rare giants,
I'm about to witness another side to this disaster.
This is actually quite spooky.
It looks like a migration of fish.
There's all these fins sticking out of the water,
and what it is, it's salmon upside down
and their tail fins breaking the surface,
and they're all sort of drifting down with the current.
And they're all dead.
Of course, it's normal for salmon to die after spawning.
I wonder if that's what's happening here.
Even more of what we're seeing too many of...
dead salmon.
And a lot of them now
in fairly advanced stages of decomposition,
which sometimes makes them fall apart
and nicely go through the net.
Other times, you just get endless, smelly fragments
just all over the place.
Just seeing all these dead fish...
I mean, it's unpleasant just from a visceral point of view,
just the smell of death.
This one is...
pretty horrible.
That was a male fish,
and it looked like that fish hadn't spawned.
And the more we set our nets,
the more I get the feeling
that something out of the ordinary is happening here.
Some of the ones that have actually broken open
'cause they're so decomposed...
They've still got eggs in.
They've still got lots of eggs in.
So this isn't normal.
Normally, dead salmon have no eggs.
They've sowed the seeds of the next generation.
But...
this isn't a normal situation.
There's something going on here.
Back at the scientists' research vessel,
taking a break from netting,
I find some salmon still alive close to shore
and decide to perform a test
using a thermometer borrowed from the scientists.
So, there's a very dramatic difference in water temperature.
I could feel it with my hands,
but according to the thermometer,
in the stream, the water was 10 degrees Celsius.
49 degrees Fahrenheit.
And the mouth of the stream
where the salmon are milling around is 15.
58 degrees Fahrenheit.
And then here,
at the side of the river where the dead salmon are is 25.
76 degrees.
That's a massive overall difference
of 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
I mean, that's just such a difference,
and the difference it makes to the fish,
again, very graphic...
The difference between being alive and being dead.
The scientists tell me
that the temperature in the river
should be about the same as it is in the spring-fed stream.
But before I arrived,
this region had the biggest heat wave in living memory,
making the river temperature soar
to a level that salmon can't survive.
Is this disaster a result of global warming?
The scientists don't know, but without a food supply,
it's another nail in the kaluga's coffin.
I ask Victor, one of the scientists,
when was the last time
he saw a monster kaluga from this river?
So, Victor grew up on the banks of this river...
On the banks of the Amur...
Has been fishing here since he was a small boy.
The biggest kaluga he's seen was about 1,300 pounds.
The biggest one he's caught himself was about 1,200 pounds.
And the fish that length, he says, is about 16 feet long.
And he remembers... This is interesting...
Fishermen are like this...
He remembers the exact date that it was caught...
On the 6th of August, 1981.
It's been more than 30 years
since he caught a monster kaluga here,
but he goes on to tell me a story
that could provide a clue
to explain the mystery of the missing fishermen.
About 40 years ago,
there was a fisherman from his village
who went out one day setting hooks.
Very interesting technique.
These hooks have no bait on them.
Then fish will actually bump into the line, get caught up.
And this fisherman went out on his own to pull in the line,
and he didn't come back.
When they recovered the boat,
they were able to piece together
what probably happened.
Yeah, thank you.
The man must have been retrieving the long line.
Long lines can be hundreds of yards long
with hooks at regular intervals.
Somewhere on the line was a kaluga.
As it felt itself being pulled towards the surface,
it panicked.
In a flash, the tables were turned.
As the fish took out more line,
several of the already retrieved,
6-inch, sharpened hooks stuck the fisherman.
Unable to free himself,
the man was dragged to his death.
This story has eerie echoes of a case I investigated
in the Congo looking for the suni, a giant catfish.
But even the biggest of these
would be dwarfed by the kaluga I'm hunting for here.
That fish pulled a man out of a small dugout.
Long lining is illegal on this river,
but if the three fishermen were poaching,
they may have been using a long line as well as a net,
which could have been doubly dangerous.
In the chaos of a huge, thrashing kaluga,
were they all dragged to their deaths?
I have proved in the past that a man in the water
is no match for a fish not even half his weight.
So a 1,500-pound angry giant
could easily take out three men.
But are there any giants left?
We set out again in one of the small fishing boats
to try and net one,
just like those dead fishermen did a couple of years ago.
The difference is,
our intentions are not to kill the kaluga,
but a huge thrashing monster doesn't know that.
We set net after net,
each drift and retrieve taking over two hours,
before moving to another spot.
And with more and more dead salmon showing up,
there seems to be nothing left alive in this river.
But then...
bubbles breaking the surface
are a sign that something's coming up from deep below.
Oh, more bubbles here.
There's something very definitely alive in our net.
That is a big fish.
So, this is it, the kaluga sturgeon of the Amur River.
Now, this is big by normal freshwater fish standards,
but by the standards
of what this fish can potentially grow to,
this is a small one.
But I've never been so happy and relieved
to find a fish alive.
These fish grow well over 1,000 pounds.
A big one of these, 15-foot long...
I can well believe now the stories of those smashing boats.
I'm afraid that the last of the giants may be gone.
But as fortunes can still be made from the fish that remain,
this story can only end in tragedy for the kaluga,
and sometimes for the fishermen who still hunt them illegally.
Despite having heard those stories
of deaths and disappearances,
the real victim is actually this fish,
which we've fished very hard for.
This is the biggest one that I've seen.
This thing's being hunted really to the edge of extinction,
all for the sake of its valuable eggs.
That's really very sad,
and I really hope that this population comes back.
But even in the face of this human onslaught,
nature has a surprising ability to cling on.
As this rare living dinosaur returns to the deep,
I find something in the boat
that gives me a glimmer of hope.
It's quite something
when I think that I've heard so much about this fish,
particularly in terms of the very large size
that it can reach...
Over 1,000 pounds, 15-16 foot long,
and to think that when I put this back,
over the course of many years,
it could grow big enough to drag people out of boats.
But here it is,
a perfect miniature kaluga.
Without doubt,
it's my smallest ever river monster,
but in terms of the significance
and hope it carries,
it could be the biggest of my entire career.