Fishing Lines: Watch out, there's a goonch about

Freshwater fish, by and large, are not man-eaters. The occasional misguided pike may snap at a hand splashed in the water, but it won't want the main course. Bull sharks in Lake Nicaragua, the world's only freshwater sharks, are said to attack humans, but they haven't been seen for some years and are probably extinct.

But Jeremy Wade knows where a man-eating freshwater fish lives. And in typical Wade fashion, he's been trying to catch it. The fish is a huge goonch, a variety of Indian catfish assembled by a team in Scrapyard Challenge. It grows to more than 600lb. Who wins in man v man-eater? You'll be able to find out in a new series of Jungle Hooks, starting on Discovery Real Time on 24 February.

Wade is too modest to claim the title, but he is the greatest angling explorer of his generation. Others travel to exotic places for mighty fish, but in most cases Wade's been there first or done something even more extreme. He is the fishing equivalent of Yuichiro Miura, the man who skied down Everest. Except Wade keeps doing it.

Somewhere Down the Crazy River, the book he wrote with fellow traveller Paul Boote (who never quite recovered from the experience) details what is probably the apex of his craziness, his quest to catch a goliath tigerfish in the Congo, which Wade, a former biology teacher, describes as "without doubt the most horrifying fish in the world". Growing to well over 150lb, it is Alien crossed with a great white shark. One memorable incident in his book still lingers. In a primitive village, a woman limped past. She had been paddling in the water and a goliath bit right through her hamstring.

Here's what one travel guide says about the Democratic Republic of Congo, where sane men fear to tread: "Travellers should avoid leaving Brazzaville and Pointe Noire, and these towns should only be visited on essential business." Wade went three times, enduring pirates, malaria and appalling conditions in the darkest parts of dark Africa. Just for a fish.

The book also details how he rediscovered the mahseer, a fish seemingly forgotten since the British departed India. Nicknamed the Indian salmon, it is so powerful that in Victorian times, tackle- makers created special rods and reels, because mahseer snapped salmon tackle with impunity.

Mahseer have drawn Wade back to India, but not to the comfort fishing on Karnataka's River Cauvery, where most mahseer hunters head for today. Too easy for Wade, that. He retraced the steps of classic books like Henry Sullivan Thomas's The Rod in India (1873) and set off for the Himalayan foothills to fish the wild waters. He even took a 19th-century greenheart rod, to see just how difficult it would have been.

And what of that man-eater? Wade is keeping the outcome secret. But he did reveal: "I talked to someone who had his fully-grown buffalo dragged beneath the water." He also fished a spot where a leopard had recently taken a child. "But man-eating leopards don't really get any publicity. Out there, they are a fact of life." No wonder he finds coming home to the Gloucestershire countryside a bit tame.