The Loch Ness Monster. The Kraken. Moby Dick. Pig Nose.
Most probably haven’t heard of that last one, but like the other monsters of the deep, the Pig Nose has long eluded humans. The only difference is that it’s actually real.
The Pig Nose is a gargantuan sturgeon — more than 10 feet long, 5 feet in girth, and weighing about 650 pounds — that lives at the bottom of the Fraser River, the longest river in British Columbia.
This particular fish earned its nickname from its stubby, pink nose, the front of which must have been lost in an accident or a fight at some point in its life, which has spanned at least 80 years, according to Atlas Obscura.
Cue 19-year-old Nick McCabe, a young man known around the Lillooet, B.C.-based River Monster Adventures as the “sturgeon whisperer.”
Last week, he went in search of a big sturgeon, something that he could brag about for years. It was his first season with the company — why not make a splash?
“We had fished all day pretty hard and struggled to get something to a good size for my group of friends that I had out,” McCabe told CBC.
On his last day out on the Fraser, he was preparing to head home, discouraged. Then, as if offering himself to the young man, Pig Nose jumped right out of the water.
“I said, ‘Well, that looks like a 10-footer, so strap on, we’re going to be into at least a two-hour fight.’ And it ended up being two hours, two hours and 15 minutes,” McCabe told CBC. “At one point he had swam upriver against the current, and I was moving up the river with the boat following him.”
The fish could have easily snapped the line. It could have won. But McCabe fought, and finally Pig Nose tired out.
It had been many years, and Pig Nose had never been captured on camera, but here was proof.
“We’re walking on clouds,” co-worker Jeff Grimolfson told Global News Canada.
McCabe took a few photos with Pig Nose, measuring it and scanning its ID microchip. Eventually, though, he released the enormous fish to go swimming back to the depths of the river to live out its life.
