Obsessed with fishing, Shen Wencheng almost abandoned his family. At the height of his passion, he drove his Porsche sports car five days a week, hauling fishing gear up mountains and down to the sea. His wife, furious, locked him out and dumped all his fishing equipment at their doorstep. He said, “Later, I wrote the song ‘Song of the Little River’ while fishing and even won an award. That’s when she stopped being angry and let me keep fishing.”
He hosted the show “The Great Adventurer” on GTV for seven years in recent years, taking cameras to Taiwan’s famous peaks. Whenever he encountered a stream in the mountains, he would pull out his fishing gear from his backpack for a quick try, catching mountain whitefish and river trout, enjoying the thrill of the tug before releasing them back into the stream. During this time, due to the immense pressure on his knees from frequent mountain hikes and descents, he developed a hard-to-cure occupational injury: “My knees would often swell up like steamed buns. The doctor suggested I get hyaluronic acid injections—extracted from rooster combs—that could keep the pain away for half a year, but I was afraid of needles, so in the end I gave up.”
After the show ended and after taking some time off, the fishing enthusiast found himself itching to cast his line again. Recently, he took on the role in Sanli’s “Taiwan Fishing Adventures,” where this time he didn’t have to hike mountains—he just had to go to the sea, finally combining work with his passion. His wife and kids have long been living in Canada and no longer get upset with him over such a minor thing as fishing. “I’m 55 years old this year and plan to retire in another five years to return to Taitung and open a farm. I’ve already bought the land and have currently planted 700 coffee trees. I’ll be heading back to my hometown soon to retire.”