An Aussie couple enjoying a day out in their tinnie on a popular river have captured the incredible moment a chance encounter saved the life of an endangered animal.
Over the holidays, Karen and her partner John were fishing in the Fitzroy River, a tourist hotspot in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, when they spotted something “strange” on the water’s edge.
“It was just really good timing,” the local told Yahoo News Australia on Monday. “It was low tide and we were going up a little, small side creek that we don’t normally go up. We were looking for live bait to fish for barramundi.
“It didn’t look like right, it didn’t look like a tree or rubbish or anything.”
Footage shows the couple slow down to get a closer look at what they initially believe is a dead fish. After hitting the sandbank below, Karen and John wade through the murky ankle-deep water, pulling their tinnie into the shallows.
“We know it’s crocodile area. We are very careful every time we get out of the boat but because of the depth of the water, you could see that there was nothing else around the area at that time,” she said.
Within seconds Karen realised the creature was actually a sawfish tangled tightly in a fishing net. Sawfish, also known as carpenter sharks, are actually a family of rays, with four species found in Queensland, the Northern Territory and WA.
“He’s bleeding dead, something’s been eating him,” she can be heard saying before John points out “there’s a fair chance there’s a croc” nearby. However, after leaning down and unhooking the net from a piece of driftwood it was caught on, the sawfish suddenly began “flapping away”.
“Luckily he was still covered in water so he was still alive. I think he’d been there for a while, he had a couple of cuts out of his back — looked like some animals, probably birds, had been pecking at him,” Karen told Yahoo. “So we pretty much went straight into rescue mode.”
Couple rush to free endangered species
Moving as fast as they could, the avid fishers grabbed a knife and John knelt over the ray’s back to remove the net from its sharp teeth.
“We had to work quickly because once that net became free he was going to start thrashing around,” Karen, who posts about her fishing adventures online, explained. It took about five minutes to release the ray, believed to be a freshwater sawfish.
The species has been listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and as vulnerable under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
“He lay there stunned for a minute and then we pushed him into the water and he just glided off,” Karen continued. While she’s previously cleaned up discarded fishing nets, the local said she had never encountered anything quite like this.
“It was very, very rewarding.”
Moving as fast as they could, the couple worked to remove the net from the sawfish’s sharp teeth. Source: Supplied/Positive Fishing
After not seeing any sawfish for many years, Karen was stunned when just a few weeks later she encountered another large ray accidentally caught on the end of her line, which she promptly freed.
Tragically, in May the ABC reported 17 endangered freshwater sawfish were found dead on a property in the state’s north.
According to the Australian Marine Conservation Society, historical fishing pressures are largely to blame for the decline of sawfish numbers. “Because of their saw-like snout — or ‘rostrum’ — they’re easily caught in gillnets and trawler nets that scour the seafloor where they live,” its website reads.
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