news/editorial

12 March 2017 News/Editorial

As spring truly arrives, the birds singing, the river (at last) settling, with a largely dry week ahead, and, we hope, some fish beginning to accumulate in the pools, consider this…...

…...size matters.

No matter how much the more smutty amongst you giggle and titter, it is undeniably true. The longest drive at golf, the biggest 6 at cricket, the tallest building in the world, the largest pumpkin, onion or marrow at your local vegetable show, I could go on…...there are few prizes for being small.

Nowhere is this more true than in angling; some are “numbers” men/women, preferring to catch quantity over quality, but give anglers the chance of catching ten small ones, or one monster, most would go for the latter.

And the odd ounce can be crucial.

In the days when you could kill a salmon without being pilloried by the ghastly pc Twitterati, I hooked and landed “a big one” no more than 100 yards from my front door, late one evening after work. Its spade like tail during the fight slightly gave the game away, I pulled it up against a tuft of grass and, dropping the rod, grabbed it, before running up the bank and knocking it on the head. Even I, having played it hard for 20 minutes in the gathering gloom, had had no real inkling of quite how big it was.

I weighed it on my old spring balance, 31½ lbs, no sea lice but a fresh autumn cock. I rang Malcolm who arrived in a hurry, confirmed the spring balance weight. “Do you think we should check that weight on the modern digital weigher?” I said yes. “Are you sure” he queried “because those old spring balances tend to weigh heavy, it may not be 30 lbs?”

So we weighed it again on the digital thingy, to a huge sigh of relief as the figures “30 lbs 1 oz” came up. I still have nightmares had it been 2 ozs lighter.

It matters.

29 lbs 15 oz would have been nothing like the same thing.

So what would I have done if, as happens all the time now, I had photographed it, measured its length, and put it back?

I would never have known what it weighed.

For this is the world we now live in. Pictures are taken, claims are made as to weight based either on no evidence at all, other than sight/estimation, or on length, without ever measuring the girth. Unusually, a weigh-net is on hand, but even then with a big fish, still alive, the net laden with water and a heavy, squirming fish in the net, it is far from easy to see a spot-on, accurate weight.

The online doubters immediately come up with “that’s never 28 lbs” or “ it looks more like 15 lbs than 25 lbs”, leaving the unfortunate angler, shortly after their moment of triumph, both bemused and disappointed as to what he/she has done to incur such digital vitriol from people he/she has never met, and never will.

Sometimes, of course, it is deserved. I have never been able to understand how the supposed Boleside autumn 50 lber of a few years ago, could ever have been claimed to be that heavy. It was undeniably big, but, the colour of mulligatawny soup, an ancient cock fish in full breeding plumage which had been in the river for many weeks, its girth must have been paper thin and its flesh flabby, soft and white.

If you are ever going to claim something as massive as 50 lbs, unheard of in recent times on the Tweed, don’t you have to be sure and have accumulated some sort of compelling evidence?

So what to do if you ever land a monster? Do you kill it (only if caught after 30th June), weigh it, and take the flak that will come your way for killing it? Do you take the ubiquitous photo and claim a weight you cannot prove based on whatever imperfect evidence you can glean, before you release it back into the water, and in the process subject yourself to the inevitable online harangue from the doubters?

I have no idea, but it is a sad and most unsatisfactory concomitant of catch and release that the big fish we spend so long dreaming of catching, so often go back into the water with no real evidence of what they truly weighed.

No matter how many of those expensive weigh-nets you have, the monster will often be caught by someone like me, fishing on their own, and even if you could weigh it before release, the doubters will still disbelieve it if you were on your own.

If I ever catch another leviathan, I will kill it, if it is half decent, weigh it and know for sure that it was (say) 35 lbs.

I will tell my friends, who will believe me, and make no mention of it anywhere on the worldwide web.

Just as it was in the good old days, before those nasty, doubting Facebook folk and carping Twitterati were even thought of.

.