River Monsters (27 page)

13

THE LAKE ILIAMNA MONSTER

Lake Iliamna is certainly the perfect place for a monster. At seventy-seven miles long and twenty-two miles across at its widest point, with a depth of nearly 1,000 feet, it could swallow Loch
Ness sideways (twenty-two miles long and mostly about a mile wide, with a maximum depth of 755 feet). Tucked away between mountains, it’s overlooked by a very sparse human population, who
don’t venture beyond its margins. And with no roads leading in, it’s not easily accessible for outsiders. If a monster were living there, it would lead a very undisturbed life. The only
thing that might alarm it would be an occasional dark object buzzing across the sky. These are the light planes that, since the 1940s, have been the preferred way of getting around this region.
When the bush pilots started spotting things in the water, which broadly matched the natives’ descriptions, the old stories gained wider credence.

In these days of the Internet, just a few minutes’ research will bring up details of half a dozen sightings from the air, between 1942 and 1977, by pilots and their passengers. All
describe elongated animals between ten and thirty feet long. But a plane flying low at over 100 mph is not an ideal platform for observing secretive wildlife. By the time you’ve spotted
something, it’s almost certainly seen you – and possibly heard you too. To avoid losing it, you must circle, but in only one of the reports did the witness keep the animal in view. And
in those days before camera phones, nobody got any photographs.

My chance to look more closely into this mystery came in July 2009. This fish would be a perfect story for a
River Monsters
TV episode: a mythical lake monster that appeared to be a fish.
As far as the production team were concerned, with their touching faith in my abilities, this would be right up my waterlogged street. But although we’d had some astounding successes on our
previous shoots, which normally last just a couple of weeks, wasn’t this biting off more than we could chew? Like a giant piraiba with its jaws round an Amazon fisherman, would I end up
regretting my overconfidence as I choked on something that, this time, was far too big for me?

I considered the countless man-hours that have been spent looking at Loch Ness, ranging from the twenty men with binoculars and cameras who spent five weeks scanning the water in 1934 for nine
hours a day to the acoustic ‘nets’, sonar sweeps, and submersibles of more recent times. Although some sonar readings were interpreted as twenty-foot-long animate objects, there remains
no conclusive proof, so the consensus among most scientists is that the monster doesn’t exist. But nor has it been definitively disproved (to do that you’d need to drain more than two
cubic miles of water), which is why many people continue to find it so compelling. The balance of probability, however, remains on the side of nonexistence. Most ‘sightings’ can be
attributed to natural phenomena. Animals such as seals and otters can appear larger than they are if they are in open water – like the giant snake I saw in a Congo tributary in 1991 that
shrank to a five-foot gaboon viper after hysterical villagers had launched a canoe and harpooned it. And I’ve seen in the Amazon how the wake of a distant boat, itself long passed, can break
on offshore shallows in waves that look like a series of dark humps. The water itself, if enclosed, can slosh back and forth when the wind pushes it, thus causing eddies, interference, and standing
waves, not to mention the wind-flattened patches in the midst of ripples, reflecting ominous darkness. On top of this there is the psychological dimension. Once a myth becomes established, it forms
part of our mental model of the world and alters our perception, the way our brains interpret the fleeting patterns our eyes pick up. To a large extent we see what we want to see rather than what
is really there.

I remember during one summer school holiday going to visit my Uncle Mike, a history teacher who lived in a tiny village near Loch Ness. I have a hazy memory of the loch: the same view as the
postcards, with Urquhart Castle in the foreground and the water behind. The biggest fish I’d caught at that time was a four-pound pike, and I was far more interested in stories about this
predator, which is said to grow huge in the loch, than in the mythical beast that fed the local tourist industry. But even so, the power of the legend still held me and I lingered for a long time
half-expecting something to break the surface. Then it was up into the mountains, hiking to forgotten lochans and narrow burns where the trout fishing was open to all and where I waved a borrowed
fly rod ineptly and unsuccessfully. The biggest fish I caught was a five-inch salmon parr, but it beat Nessie watching, which didn’t really interest me because it wasn’t a fish and
because I knew it was something I would never see.

So what were my chances on Lake Iliamna? I reminded myself that I had something of a track record for seeing and filming things that other people hadn’t, such as the Amazon saw-backed lake
monster and goonch underwater in their natural habitat. But here there was very little to go on – no grainy images on film or video to computer-enhance. There was, however, an extensive oral
history, and the obvious first step was to tap into this.

The normal way to get around Alaska is by float plane; they use planes like other people drive cars. Waiting to take off from Anchorage, I was not totally relaxed about this given my previous
experience with light aircraft, and a preflight chat with a regular passenger was only partially reassuring. ‘You go in through Lake Clark Pass,’ she said. ‘It could be sunny this
side, but you go in and it’s snowing. You’ve got to turn an L-shaped corner in total white-out. But you can’t turn round either, because it’s so narrow. So now they’ve
got these webcams there, so they can check the weather before they fly.’

We approached the mountains over tidal mudflats and wandering creeks, passing three oil platforms in Cook Inlet. I was facing backwards, towards our strapped-in kit, and for the sake of my neck,
I had to content myself with looking mostly out to the side. But already I could sense that the snow-covered peaks ahead were higher than our 2,500-foot altitude, as the valley we were following
closed in on either side. Soon there was sheer rock alongside, slipping by in an eerie slow motion that belied our roaring speed. All around were graphic reminders of gravity: glaciers sliding down
from the peaks way above and vertical chutes of born-again water.

We landed in Port Alsworth, halfway down Lake Clark, which is linked to Lake Iliamna by thirty miles of river. This small settlement is situated beside a sheltered inlet, where float planes can
land on calm water regardless of the wind’s direction, so it’s the perfect base for Lake Clark Air, which covers the Iliamna area.

Legendary bush pilot Leon ‘Babe’ Alsworth, who gave up logging his flying hours after 48,000, founded the original air-taxi service here. He also saw the Iliamna monster in the
1940s. His son, Glen Alsworth Sr., a soft-spoken man with a white beard and twinkling eyes, now runs the company, and I buttonholed him in between flights to get more details of that sighting.
‘This day it was absolutely glassy water calm,’ he told me. ‘And my father was flying across the lake in his float plane. And he noticed two large fish near a reef in shallow
water . . . So he circled them to try to get an idea of how big they were, and he judged them to be the same size as the floats on his aircraft – probably more than fifteen feet
long.’

But there was more: ‘As the fish began to move from the shallow water. . .he looked down into the deep water, and there was a school of perhaps a hundred fish. To him they looked small,
but when these fish joined them from the reef, they were all the same size . . . It was a shoal of huge, huge fish.’

Glen Sr. has never seen such a sight himself, but in 2008 he saw an animal that he reckoned was between eight and ten feet long. The wind was blowing offshore, and it was swimming in the
shore’s calm wind shadow in about fifteen feet of water at the edge of the drop-off. At first he thought it was a seal, but its tail was moving from side to side. Glen Sr. is highly
experienced at spotting fish from the air for sport-fishermen, but this was none of the normal species, and it was much bigger. As the plane turned for another pass, the fish moved into deeper
water.

But on the same flat-calm day when Glen Sr.’s father spotted the giant fish he also saw something even stranger. Approaching the shallower southwest end of the lake and flying into the
sun, ‘He could see on the surface of the water what looked like huge octopus. He could see these large, round kind of animals, or something that was underwater but lying at the surface. And
as they would fly over them, they would sink, they would go down, they would start descending in the water. And initially he passed it off as some type of illusion. . . but he saw a lot of
them.’ His passenger also saw them, a schoolteacher he was taking to the town of Levelock. Babe Alsworth estimated that the arms of these creatures had a spread of nearly one hundred feet.
‘Whatever they were, they were very large, and there were many of them,’ said Glen Sr.

Then came another surprise: the stories aren’t restricted to Iliamna. Back in the same era, one of their aircraft technicians hooked something very large in Lake Clark. The man was in the
habit of fishing a set line for lake trout and had suffered some break-offs. He kept upping the strength of his line, but the same thing happened. Eventually he forged a giant steel hook in the
workshop, baited it with half a salmon, and attached it to a length of aircraft control cable. He then secured this to a heavy tree stump washed up on the lake shore. The next day a neighbour,
looking out at the lake, spotted a tree stump moving in the water, against the wind. At first he worried about his sanity – that is, until he heard the explanation from the equally
incredulous mechanic.

Hearing this, although it happened more than half a century ago, I couldn’t resist putting out a large bait myself. Wedging my rod upright on the shore, I took a fillet of salmon out by
inflatable kayak and released it beyond the drop-off in thirty feet of water. It was my first Alaskan night outdoors, but in the Arctic summer, just six degrees south of the Arctic Circle, it never
really gets dark, something that contributed to the unreality of what I was doing. I flattened the seats in the beached kayak and lay down inside it, but the wind and lapping waves that rocked it
didn’t allow me to sink into the near-sleep state in which I’m oblivious to everything except the urgent scream of the ratchet. I kept having to check that I hadn’t drifted out
– with mist obscuring all around, and a thousand feet of water underneath me. When morning came, the line still hung slack.

The next story I heard was from Bill Trefon, a native Alaskan of the Dena’ina tribe who lives on the shore of Lake Clark. One day in 1957 his parents were out on the lake when there was an
impact and their motor stopped. Bill’s father pulled up the motor to inspect it, and while he was doing this, his wife saw a large tail break the surface behind the boat. But this
wasn’t the most extraordinary thing. ‘There were teeth marks on the propeller,’ said Bill.

His mother said that, based on the size of the tail, the fish must have been ten or twelve feet long. The largest known predator in the lake is the northern pike (
Esox lucius
). Perhaps
the prop had acted like a fishing lure and a pike had reflex-hit because of its flash and vibration. If so, this would be highly unusual behaviour: you’d expect the mass and movement of the
boat to deter it. But a wake actually attracts certain aggressive predators such as marlin (expecting to find propeller-minced small fish?), which will hit skittering teasers right up against the
transom.

I’d heard there are big pike in Lake Clark, but I wanted to put this to the test. The weather had turned exceptionally sunny, so my guide, Glen Alsworth Jr., took me fish spotting in the
air. In summer, pike move into shallows, so we circled a weedy creek across the lake where we saw some loglike shadows. The next day we went there in the boat, and I missed a take right in the weed
stems on a surface-fished rubber frog and then caught a two-pounder on a bucktail jig, a weighted three-inch strip of white fur that kicks just like a small fish if you twitch it along the bottom.
But I hooked nothing big. So we came out into deeper water, a bay that a ten-foot cliff topped with bushes partially bounds. Underneath this, right against the rock, was a classic ambush position,
not just for picking off small fish but also bonus items, such as nestling birds falling in from above. From fifteen yards out I dropped a spinnerbait repeatedly into this zone, without result.
We’d now drifted past the most promising area, so I sent a last-chance cast back along the rock face, and halfway in there was a sharp wrench. In the clear water I soon saw that it was a
pike, which we beached on a small patch of waterlogged bank and measured at forty inches. Weighing maybe twenty pounds, this was a very respectable pike. A thirty-five-pounder would be the fish of
a lifetime. But even the largest pike in the most uncertain historical reports, such as the ninety-pounder netted in Ireland in the late 1800s, wouldn’t measure more than six feet. So the
fish in Bill’s story was not likely to be a pike. But what could possibly bite a moving propeller and survive?