Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Jeremy Wade
Explore popular quotes and sayings by Jeremy Wade.
Last updated on September 19, 2024.
I think fish do have personalities. Fish have very small brains so there's not much going on in there. But different types of fish have different personalities.
There are some species, one was the Goliath Tigerfish, that took me six years to track down and catch.
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.
With rivers, you don't have a lot of room to work, and with the bigger fish that I'm catching, you might have just a few feet to work with.
I've been in situations where if I'd been careless I could have been missing some fingers or a hand or something like that, or a very, very bad bleed or whatever.
Everything starts with fishermen's tales. Everywhere you go the fishermen talk.
My background is very much tropical rainforests. We did a lot in the earlier series in places like the Amazon and the Congo. Almost as an antidote to that, I quite like more open, mountainous regions.
I've become an accidental anthropologist.
I was on the Mekong River between the border of Thailand and Laos. I was there to find the elusive Mekong giant catfish but the border police were suspicious. Along with my film, they confiscated my passport and started making accusations about my political allegiances.
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.
Once I started catching fish I was very curious to see what other fish there are. This happens to most people who fish - they want to catch bigger fish.
We all need a bit of mystery in our lives, and rivers offer plenty of that.
With 'River Monsters,' it sometimes didn't matter if the story was made up or exaggerated.
In an ideal world, you don't want creatures where they shouldn't be because there's always unintended consequences.
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.
Starting in my late 20s, I would go on one fishing trip a year to an exotic location. I went to India and caught what was essentially a giant carp. I went to Thailand and got myself arrested as a suspected spy. I went to the Congo and got malaria. But even the bad stuff is material.
Normally, you want the river when the water is low and not when it's flooded. For example, there are parts of the Amazon where the water goes up to 15 meters high. This floods the forest, so a lot of the fish that normally stay close together are suddenly very hard to find.
The stream at the end of your street can be a place where you make contact with this whole other amazing world hidden right there beneath the surface. Fishing can be the passport to that world.
But the whole reason I fish is that you never know for sure what is down there. Unless you drained Loch Ness you will never be certain what's living in it.
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.
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.
The thing about the oceans is there is the benefit of water clarity. You can see what's going on there, but a lot of fresh water is murky. You just can't see what's there and I think, for that reason, rivers haven't featured so much on wildlife TV.
Fish don't have hands; to investigate, they open their mouth, and sometimes it's someone's foot.
I have feared for my life on fishing trips - I was once in a plane crash in the Amazon, for example, and I've been trapped in a sinking boat - but not when actually handling fish, although I have been injured by fish.
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.
It's always the crocodile you don't see you have to worry about.
I did catch a bull shark, and also accidentally caught two very large groupers. The bigger one was not far short of 400 lbs. It just reinforced that fishing is about the unexpected. You sit there waiting for one thing, and then something totally different comes along.
Lake Garda it's very different. The northern part of the lake is very much Loch Ness, deep sides, but as soon as you get into the south it opens out. You walk around, you see shallow waters, and you see weeds that should feed a small fish. You think, 'Ah, this is different'.
I have caught some big eels in New Zealand, where the climate is very similar to Scotland. But they grow to around five feet long.
I was 7 or 8, and my parents gave me a rod and reel as a way to get me out of the house. My first fish was a roach fish, and I remember being frightened to touch it. It was wriggling and cold blooded, but it was magical.
My background is getting into the kinds of places where outsiders don't normally go, with enough energy left to put a line in the water.
One place that I have very strong memories of is the Congo. That's somewhere I've been to four times. It's not a place where normally outsiders go, which is what makes it very special.
The first time you catch a fish, it's amazing. You make contact with this whole other world that exists, hidden, under the water.
The human mind doesn't like a vacuum. We will populate that vacuum with the contents of our own head, and often that's scary stuff.
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.
So even if there was a mutation in Loch Ness I still don't think you're going to see a 30ft eel.
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.
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.
I think it's true to say that everybody has a fascination with predators. It's something that's hardwired into us.
Florida's nice and warm, there's all sorts of stuff living there that shouldn't be there!
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.
A river without monsters is a scarier prospect because it means the water is unhealthy.
I have caught eels from Loch Ness, as we did a River Monsters episode which started off there. They weren't very big - just 18 inches. I'm sure there may be bigger eels, but you're only talking about 10lbs.
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.
The thing is, if you always catch fish then you lose interest because any achievement is related to facing difficulty; having to work hard for it.
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.
When the fish relaxes, that's when I bring the rod down and reel in. But you don't rush it. If it runs, you let it run.
I gave up fishing in England. It got too crowded.
I made a series set in India that was more of a conventional fishing show. The fish were very uncooperative, so we were casting around for other bits of local color. We heard local stories of something pulling people into the water. They called it the Kali man-eater. We did a bit of a feature on this, and if formed part of that series.
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.
You start off interested in variety and then it's always about bigger fish, bigger fish and I became fairly obsessive, I think, in my late teens and early 20s.
The other thing is, visibility is often not very good in fresh water. So if a fish bites something, a part of the body, it doesn't actually always realize that it's part of a body. It just sees something sort of waving around in front of it.
Most sharks can't tolerate freshwater but bull sharks have a quirk of their physiology that enables them to.
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.
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.
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.
It's a bit like some martial arts: if you're behind somebody there's not much they can do, if you're in a certain position. So same thing with a fish, if you're in the right position you're okay. As soon as you get in the wrong position you can be in very real danger.
Sea water is clear and you can put the camera in sea water and you can see stuff, whereas freshwater is often zero visibility.
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.
I don't see myself as a particularly expert angler.
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