Podcast Interview: “River Monsters” Host Jeremy Wade

Jeremy Wade battles a giant grouper on "River Monsters"

MidCurrent gear editor Tim Romano interviews Jeremy Wade, host of Animal Planet’s show “River Monsters.” He asks Jeremy about the type of survival gear he takes with him and when we can expect to see an entire River Monsters episode devoted entirely to catching fish on a fly rod.

Direct download: MidCurrent Interviews Jeremy Wade

Jeremy Wade is a biologist, extreme angler and writer specializing in travel and natural history. He is best known for using fishing as a means to look beneath the surface of human life in remote places, notably the Congo and the Amazon. Having grown up in rural Suffolk in the United Kingdom, he studied zoology at Bristol University and went on to teach biology at a grammar school in Kent.

Wade started fishing on the Suffolk Stour and went on to fish stillwaters for carp and catfish. At 16, he was the youngest member of the British Carp Study Group. In his early twenties, however, he hung up his rods, an antisocial response to overcrowded British lakes. Then in 1982, inspired by a magazine article about fishing for mahseer, he went to India.

Since then he has made many expeditions to Southeast Asia, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), India (again) and the Amazon. During these journeys he caught malaria, was arrested for spying, narrowly escaped drowning and survived a plane crash. In between, he has worked as a tour leader, motorcycle dispatch rider, supply teacher, art tutor, translator (Portuguese-English), public relations consultant, dishwasher and newspaper reporter. For a while he was senior copywriter at an advertising agency—until the excitement became too much for him.