Words matter. These are the best Jeremy Wade Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve had some hands on experience with some very big bull sharks. One false move you could be minus a few fingers or worse. You’ve got to respect them because it’s more about what they are capable of.
Twenty-five years ago my two main target species were goliath tigerfish and arapaima from the Amazon. Each took me six years to track down and catch, over the course of three expeditions to the Congo and six to the Amazon.
With ‘River Monsters,’ it sometimes didn’t matter if the story was made up or exaggerated.
Normally if you are in a boat, you can follow a fish around, but if you are on the shore, you have to pull it.
I’ve been stabbed by a catfish. They’ve got quite sharp spines on their pectoral fins.
Florida’s nice and warm, there’s all sorts of stuff living there that shouldn’t be there!
The ‘River Monsters’ episodes acted a bit like a whodunit – there was a crime scene, maybe someone had been pulled under, and we had to find out what happened.
I like eating fish and the thing is when I’m on a shoot, quite often the fish that I catch are bigger than me. Although I have a very healthy appetite I could normally eat about a pound of fish in a meal. I can’t eat 100 pounds of fish or 200 pounds of fish.
The ‘Amazon Nessie’ turned out to be a malformed pink river dolphin, so not a fish, although quite fish-like in appearance.
A lot of fish that live in the sea, they are your normal, nice, pretty, silvery, shiny fish.
People assume I’m fearless. A lot of the things I deal with are pretty scary. Fear makes you pay attention – it’s about absolute concentration.
It took me six years going to the Amazon, three months at a time, to actually track down the arapaima. That’s commonly said to be the biggest fresh-water fish in the world. Nobody knows for sure, but a lot of people think so.
One of my favorite fish is the Arapaima. It lives in the Amazon and they grow maybe nine feet long and one might weigh two of me.
Fishing as a spectator sport in real time is the most boring thing you can imagine.
The way that we live with potentially dangerous animals is not to kill them, but to understand them and to coexist with them.
The arapaima, found in South America, has an elongated body and a head so bony that the male fish will sometimes kill each other with a nifty headbutt. It’s believed to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world.
The first time you catch a fish, it’s amazing. You make contact with this whole other world that exists, hidden, under the water.
Fishing is quite a good metaphor for life. You do your prep, you do your thinking, you put your bait out, and you wait, confident that you’ve done your groundwork. But a lot of life is luck.
I actually found contracting malaria in the Congo fascinating. Observing your body under attack from this microorganism and seeing how it responds is simultaneously fascinating and awful but maybe that’s just because I’m a former biology teacher.
A fish with a big mouth, like a catfish, they’ve been known to bite people’s legs. Normally not because they’re hungry, but because they’re protecting a nest or something like that.
There’s less mystery in the sea than there is in fresh water. If you look at television there’s lots of documentaries on whales, on coral reefs, the deep oceanic trenches. There’s loads of stuff. But as soon as you look for anything about fresh water, the information is very sketchy.
We are descended from people who paid attention to dangerous things in the environment. People who didn’t pay attention to dangerous things in the environment didn’t get to survive and to breed.
I gave up fishing in England. It got too crowded.
I grew up in a little village in England that had a river running through it so I’ve been fishing from a very early age, maybe seven or eight.
With ‘River Monsters’, I am the investigator: here’s the crime scene, I talk to witnesses, I establish a suspects list, I narrow it down; here’s the prime suspect, I go and arrest the prime suspect – who often doesn’t want to come quietly.
I’ve become an accidental anthropologist.
The great thing about freshwater fish is most of them are incredibly ugly, a lot of them are, so no one can fail to look good next to some of these things.
Even without the creatures living in it, water is dangerous. We have an ambivalent relationship with water. It’s the source of life, it’s the source of food, but it’s also a source of death, if you’re not careful.
Being in front of a class full of kids, you are giving a performance. You have to get their attention. You’ve got to awaken their curiosity. You become a bit of an entertainer.
In an ideal world, you don’t want creatures where they shouldn’t be because there’s always unintended consequences.
I go to the Congo or the Amazon, but every river has its mystery of what is down there.
If I’d had a magic ejector seat when I went to Zaire, which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, I would have pressed it multiple times. I felt totally out of my depth. I had no money and there was precious little infrastructure so I had to barter to survive.
Most sharks can’t tolerate freshwater but bull sharks have a quirk of their physiology that enables them to.
You don’t necessarily have to go to some exotic location halfway around the world. You can find that other world very close to where you live.
Fishermen can be very superstitious and sometimes you do find yourself thinking, this fish has got a curse on it, it’s just not going to happen.
