We spent three days camping in the bush filming as many off these as we could. The crocs were everywhere. At night you could see their eyes all along the river’s edge and by day they’d disappeared, which was a tad disconcerting especially when my job is to be swimming around in it. We camped at the top of a hill as they’re ‘probably’ too lazy to climb it.
Much of the fishing needed to be done at night so we’re hanging around on the edges of dark croc infested water. On the first night we caught a whip ray and put it in a pool which we’d separated from the main river with a rock barrage to save it till morning light. In the morning we tagged and released it. I swam with it across the shallow river and got some nice footage. The way rays swim is beautiful - floating over the sand and effortlessly sliding through the water with a ripple of their edges.
We’re filming with Dion and Kate who are biologists from Territory Wildlife Park. They’ve brought a 2 metre long sawfish to re-release into the wild as it has out-grown their aquarium. They get it out of the transporter tank and it thrashes it’s toothed-snout around with incredible power. Until then I had only ever seen footage of sawfish being a bit lame with their rostrum (snout) so it was quite a shock and a wake up call as in a few minutes I’m going to be in the water with it.
We put it into a large pool corralled off from open water so it can’t escape. We need to film it and Dion and Kate wanted to observe and tag it before they release it for good.
I watch it’s movements for a while and slowly get in the water at one of the points it keeps passing. The waters is only about 18 inches deep. I fill my pockets with stones so I’m lying on the bottom on my front breathing through a snorkel. The water is very clear for fresh water and the sun is high so the scene looks great but it’s still only about three or four feet visibility. This would be fine if only there wasn’t a seven foot fish with lethal nose in the pool with me.
Every time it passes it comes out of nowhere to be right in my face. I can’t see it with enough notice to get it framed up well. So our AP Shaun stands on the edge of the pool shouting out where the fish is, “11 O’clock, heading straight for you!”. This works a treat.
Unwittingly I’ve got my legs apart for balance when Shaun shouts, “Behind you, heading straight for you, close your legs!”.
This seems a good time to establish the things I know about sawfish -
1) They lash out with their rostrum when they panic.
2) They can’t swim backwards. A dead end will panic them.
Between my legs is currently a sawfish dead end. There’s no way I’m closing my legs around it.
“Rob, it’s between your legs”.
I’m not moving a muscle. Lying on my front means I can’t look down at all so I just lie there imagining what’s happening between my legs. My future ability to have children is floating in the balance.
After what seems like an age I feel the fish brush under my shin.
“She’s gone Rob”.
Bloody hell. I can breath and I can close my legs.
For the next hour or so she circles the pool and I get some great shots. It’s a privilege to be so close to such rare and incredible animal in the wild. I think the sawfish might have jumped to the top of my favorite fish table.
When we’ve got what we need we catch her, tag her and let her go into the main river. She swims off quite happy. She will be tracked for the next week to make sure she adapts back into the wild.
The next day is spent filming three 3 ft long bull sharks and a barramundi fish who plays the game and hangs out under a snag (a fallen tree in the river) for hours while we film him.
A few days later we go out with some national park rangers to catch a saltwater crocodile. In Australia’s national parks there’s an uneasy relationship between people and ‘salties’. As an indigenous species the salties are looked after however the parks other role is to encourage people to use the waterways. Salties are often aggressive and territorial which leads to occasional problems with them eating people.
One solution the rangers practice here is the catching of crocs that look to be getting too cocky. They truss them up for a couple of hours and then release them. The theory being that the saltie learns who’s boss.
So we’re filming just that. We get a fairly large 11ft saltie croc. After filming with it we set up to release it on a boat ramp. Our presenter Zeb and some of the rangers are sitting on the croc to hold it down. Producer Tuktaa and I are filming from the head end of the croc. We’re waiting for the signal for us to get out of the way - being as we are right between the croc and the river. Zeb and the rangers are given the instruction to jump off the croc and retreat. We’re aren’t given our signal. . . the croc is lose and we’re right in it’s path.
It starts to move towards the river (and us) and it doesn’t take us or the ranger long to realise we shouldn’t be where we are. He shouts to us and we leap up a 5 foot high wall to our right. I don’t know how I got up it with the camera and I don’t know how Tuktaa got up it all as it’s pretty much the same height as her. I just get the camera back to my eye in time to shoot the croc hitting the water. Near miss number 1.
A few days later we have a day of underwater shooting in a facility where they have controlled pools for the filming of crocs. The way it works is the croc wranglers tie the croc’s mouth shut with fishing line - enough to keep it shut but little enough that the line can’t be seen by the camera. I’ve never done this sort of filming before and I’m not really that keen on tying up animals just to film them. It doesn’t seem to be as bad as it sounds for the crocs though. They don’t need to open their mouths to breath and they’re incredibly tough animals - the treatment of them when the we were catching them in the national park was quite brutal.
First up is a smallish (7 ft) freshwater croc. ‘Freshies’ are not as aggressive or big as salties, that said they can still do you a lot of damage if they want to. I’m in the small natural looking pool and the croc is put in. It’s cool. The water is clear and the croc is quite lively, swimming about underwater. I get some good stuff.
A fallen tree has been put across the pool to make it look like a snag in a natural river. I lock my ankles to the branches and hang, holding my breath, upside down in the water filming the croc swimming round me. This works well to give me some grounding and stops me kicking up the sediment on the bottom. After about an hour we’ve got some great stuff. Time for the saltie.
The saltie is much bigger - 13ft. And it’s a much chunkier animal too - the largest reptile species in the world and basically a living dinosaur. By now the sediment in the water has been unavoidably kicked up and so the visibility is down to little more than 18 inches.
This means I have to get really close to the croc before I can even see it. I’m swimming around the bottom of the pool literally bumping into one of the fiercest predators in the world. I get a few shots but it’s less keen to swim around than the freshie was. I call for the wrangler to move it for me.
He reaches down and manages to pick it up - only because in water it’s almost neutrally buoyant - on land it had taken four of us to carry it to the pool. He takes it to the shallows and sits on it’s back so I can get close ups of it’s head in the clearer shallow water.
I’m 3 or 4 feet away when the croc has a bit of wriggle and suddenly his jaws are wide open! The fishing line has snapped! I back off and struggle out of the water with the heavy underwater housing at about an 8th of the speed I’d have liked to have been out of there. The wrangler is still sitting on the crocs back and the croc is writhing about. I grab a rope, and copying what we’d filmed when catching crocs a few nights earlier, I make a noose and drop it over the crocs nose and pull it tight. The noose tightens and locks between it’s teeth, the wrangler then reaches forwards and closes it’s mouth. Shaun then holds the jaws of the 13ft croc shut while the wrangler tapes them closed!
It starts to rain and gets dark so that’s it for the day. Probably for the best.
