Baller fishing

Meet Jeremy Wade, the man who’s turned fishing into a certifiable rockstar occupation.

MANILA, Philippines - You wouldn’t think it, in all honesty, but Jeremy Wade is a bloody rockstar. At 58 years old with a shock of silver hair and a serious tan, the professional angler and host of the hit Discovery Channel show River Monsters makes 20-somethings with CrossFit memberships look bad. But good looks and badass reputations are far from Wade’s mind — he’s never more excited than to talk about the majestic river creatures he interacts with on a regular basis. Sitting down with Young STAR at the Singapore River Safari (where he swam with arapaimas and manatees to a captive audience), Jeremy talks about fish sympathy, dealing with boredom, and who would win in a battle between freshwater and sea creatures.

Young STAR: Hey, Jeremy! How are you doing?

JEREMY WADE: Yeah, very good. I feel quite refreshed having been in the water.

I’ve always wondered… do you still eat fish?

I do love fish. But fish numbers in the ocean and in rivers are going down, so it’s important for me to try to eat fish in places where I know there are lots of that particular fish. But often it’s very hard to know where the fish came from.

 You don’t feel any sympathy for them?

I do a little bit, actually! I mean, you saw today I went diving. I know some people who go diving in coral reefs and don’t eat fish then say, “They’re my friends, I don’t eat them.” I feel a little bad there. So what I do, is that I don’t eat fish a lot.

Looking at all the time you spend between setting up your gear and actually catching the fish, you seem to have a lot of down time. What do you do when you’re bored? Surely, you can’t just stand by your fishing rod the whole time.

I do! Well, sometimes, I don’t. One of the programs in the season that is coming up was very, very slow. I had been there for a week and caught nearly nothing. I started actually fishing through the night as well. What I did there was that I rigged up electronic alarms to let me know if it caught something. I told everybody else, “You can go and sleep, I will go make a noise if something happens.” But yeah, sometimes we chat, but we still have to be really quiet and stealthy so we don’t scare the fish away.

You seem to have changed the way people perceive fishermen and fishing. How do you feel about being turning fishing into a badass activity?

(Laughs) I came from England, and the idea of fishing there is someone who is very boring, someone who doesn’t have any friends, and somebody who does something that nobody understands. I’m kind of glad that I get to do a sort of PR job for fishing, actually. What’s nice is that it’s watched by a lot of people who fish, but also by people who don’t fish. Some these people have wives or girlfriends who watch the show. They still don’t fish but now they understand what fishing is all about.

Have you ever thought of doing a spinoff of your show, like Lake Monsters or something?

We do lakes, actually! We just say River Monsters to distinguish it from the sea. But we’ve actually done programs set in the ocean as well.

Right. And you have mentioned in your program that you prefer exploring freshwater than the sea.

Yeah, because it’s more mysterious. What’s interesting here [at Singapore River Safari] that you can see them in clear water. If they were in their natural habitat, you wouldn’t see them because the water is soupy. You would see nothing.

But much of the ocean hasn’t been explored either, right?

I would say that we are more familiar with the ocean. Starting with Jack Costeau in the 1960s, they went down the ocean with their cameras… there are lots of TV programs, books, pictures as well. With freshwater, there’s real exploration. I’m showing people animals they didn’t know existed. Even though there’s a tiny amount of freshwater compared to the world’s oceans, there’s actually the same number of species in freshwater than in the ocean. There’s actually much more diversity in freshwater than in the ocean. The habitat is more complicated. It’s fascinating.

So if there was ever a battle between freshwater and saltwater creatures, who do you think would win?

(Laughs) What’s interesting there is that if sea creatures tried to swim up rivers, they would basically swim up water, swell up, and explode. And if you put river fish in saltwater, it would suck fluids through the gills, it would die. But some fish can go to both. The lamprey, salmon, sturgeons, can travel to both. The bull shark can swim from the sea to the rivers… so who knows?

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Catch the latest season of River Monsters on The Discovery Channel.