Why do fishermen lie?
Why are fishermen prone to exaggerating the size of their catches? It's something I have been pondering after reading on the Fishdee website that salmon of 22lb and 20lb were caught on the beat of the river Dee that I fished last week.
I know all about these fish since I caught them. Once upon a time you caught a salmon, you knocked it on the head and then you weighed it carefully on a spring balance, only rounding up the figure by a few ounces.
Since a catch-and-release policy was introduced on to the River Dee, however, there has been an imperative to ensure that your fish gets back in to the river swiftly and safely. This means that I use a net all the time these days and seldom lift a fish out of the water for more than a second or two.
If it's a good fish I try to take a measure with my rod or wading stick so that I can use one of the length-weight conversion tables that give you a rough idea of a weight. The first salmon I caught last week was a beautiful specimen, very silvery and fresh from the sea with sea lice still attached.
It was hooked just above some falls and there was a danger for a little while that it would escape the way it had come as it headed back towards the lip of the falls. But I managed to hold it in the stream and finally brought it to the net. The ghillie had appeared, as they do so often on these occasions, almost out of nowhere.
He reckoned the fish was "touching 20lb" since it had a very wide girth, so there it was - my 20 pounder. Then, on my last evening at the river, I hooked another big fish, an inch or so larger than the other, according to a measure against my wading stick while it was still in the net. So I put this one down as 22lb. But something rankled. I had caught fish of this weight before and in my memory the fish I had in the past seemed to have been bigger.
Another thing - although they fought well, both were well hooked and neither gave me too much trouble after one or two runs. It was just a case of tiring them out and getting them in. Back home last night I found that my rough measures did not correspond to a 20lb+ fish. At best, I reckon, the first one was 18lb and the second 19lb.I feel a bit guilty about this but I guess I'm only confirming what the none-fishing community has always suspected - that anglers can be economical with the truth.
Next time I shall take my spring balance.
The 26lb fish mentioned on the site was caught by my father-in-law - not bad for an 81-year-old. He has caught many salmon in the past and estimated that this one - which he didn't measure - was between 25 and 28 pounds, so we settled for 26 pounds. Not scientific, I know, but neither is fishing. Anyway, I do not doubt him. There were some big fish in the river last week. I saw one giant in the 30lb to 40lb class.
Gill, my wife, has a spring balance built in to her landing net so she could confirm that her two fish each weighed just less than 5lbs. On second thoughts, perhaps I'll leave the balance at home.
I know all about these fish since I caught them. Once upon a time you caught a salmon, you knocked it on the head and then you weighed it carefully on a spring balance, only rounding up the figure by a few ounces.
Since a catch-and-release policy was introduced on to the River Dee, however, there has been an imperative to ensure that your fish gets back in to the river swiftly and safely. This means that I use a net all the time these days and seldom lift a fish out of the water for more than a second or two.
If it's a good fish I try to take a measure with my rod or wading stick so that I can use one of the length-weight conversion tables that give you a rough idea of a weight. The first salmon I caught last week was a beautiful specimen, very silvery and fresh from the sea with sea lice still attached.
It was hooked just above some falls and there was a danger for a little while that it would escape the way it had come as it headed back towards the lip of the falls. But I managed to hold it in the stream and finally brought it to the net. The ghillie had appeared, as they do so often on these occasions, almost out of nowhere.
He reckoned the fish was "touching 20lb" since it had a very wide girth, so there it was - my 20 pounder. Then, on my last evening at the river, I hooked another big fish, an inch or so larger than the other, according to a measure against my wading stick while it was still in the net. So I put this one down as 22lb. But something rankled. I had caught fish of this weight before and in my memory the fish I had in the past seemed to have been bigger.
Another thing - although they fought well, both were well hooked and neither gave me too much trouble after one or two runs. It was just a case of tiring them out and getting them in. Back home last night I found that my rough measures did not correspond to a 20lb+ fish. At best, I reckon, the first one was 18lb and the second 19lb.I feel a bit guilty about this but I guess I'm only confirming what the none-fishing community has always suspected - that anglers can be economical with the truth.
Next time I shall take my spring balance.
The 26lb fish mentioned on the site was caught by my father-in-law - not bad for an 81-year-old. He has caught many salmon in the past and estimated that this one - which he didn't measure - was between 25 and 28 pounds, so we settled for 26 pounds. Not scientific, I know, but neither is fishing. Anyway, I do not doubt him. There were some big fish in the river last week. I saw one giant in the 30lb to 40lb class.
Gill, my wife, has a spring balance built in to her landing net so she could confirm that her two fish each weighed just less than 5lbs. On second thoughts, perhaps I'll leave the balance at home.
Labels: catch-and-release, Fishdee, River Dee, salmon, wading stcik
posted by Richard Donkin at
3:05 PM
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