Another big Scottish salmon

Did you see the report that a 40+ pounds salmon had been caught on the River Dee last week at Banchory? It was caught on the Lower Blackhall beat a few miles east of Potarch Bridge pictured here.

The measured length, according to its captor, Nick Craigs, was 53 inches, pointing to an extremely large fish. He has made a relatively conservative estimate on weight of 42 pounds (still the fish of a lifetime, for sure, but nowhere near as big as the claimed length would suggest).

If you look at the Sturdy Scale for calculating the weight of salmon, a 42 pound fish equates to a length of 46 ins. Against the measure of 53 ins is the hallowed weight of 64 pounds. I say hallowed, of course, because this was the weight of the British record salmon caught by Georgina Ballantine in 1922.

Poor Mr Craigs. Unlike the giant salmon caught by Donald Milne on the Ness last October, there were no other witnesses to this catch. No photographs either. And here we are with yet another measure that would appear to challenge the British record.

It should be noted that a 64 pound fish would indeed have been a record of sorts because the Dee is fly only and Miss Ballantine's fish was hooked using the harling method. A fly caught fish of this size really is in exclusive company. Only six (three in Scotland, one in England and two in Norway)of 64 lb and above are listed in Fred Buller's authoritative book, The Domesday Book of Giant Salmon. Why didn't any of these secure the British record, you may ask? It's all to do with authentication.

Poor Mr Craigs. For the rest of his life he must live with questions about that fish, not least those he will ask of himself. How carefully did he make his measure? Could there have been a teensy weency slip up, some nagging doubt? If not, why be so conservative? As he says in his account it was dusk when he landed the fish.

If I were him I would say to hell with the naysayers. I have caught a few big fish (by big here I'm talking closer to the 20 lb mark) and lost one or two larger ones when fishing alone. I know what they were. Today they are nothing but memories. But what memories. This one will be his great memory - something for the grandchildren. The fish itself was returned (in line with Dee fishing policy) to breed yet more big fish.

There are going to be many more stories such as this in the coming year or so. the bigger fish are coming back, I have no doubt. We are unlikely to see the Ballantine record broken for the simple reason that more and more anglers, like Mr Craigs, are returning their catch and that has to be a good thing. Let's leave the record talk and the disputes to the bar room and congratulate those who fulfill the dream of every salmon angler.

Fly fishing forums

If you pick up Trout and Salmon Magazine this month (February) and turn to page 10 you can read my thoughts on angling internet forums.

I contacted the Trout and Salmon editor a while back proposing a piece on Taimen fishing in Mongolia, thinking readers might be as intrigued as I was about the mysterious Taimen, one of the oldest and largest of all the salmonids.

I had written a piece on Taimen in Mongolia for the FT's How to Spend It Magazine (the forthcoming May issue) so it was all still fresh in my mind.

Trout and Salmon replied that they would be interested in a feature on internet forums. They had seen something I had written on forums in one of my columns. I offer Taimen, they ask for forums - this happens all the time in publishing.

It didn't matter. I really am intrigued by web forums and the way they work and wanted to write something that outlined the good, the bad and the ugly of web-based conversations.

I thought the article would be a useful way of telling people who might never buy the Financial Times that (a) a fishing column exists there, (b) that I write it, and (c) that the stuff that I write can also be read here at RichardDonkin.com.

Another thing is that I read Trout and Salmon magazine (even if I experience a feeling of deja vu over many of the articles) so it was nice to be part of it for a month.

To all my fellow members of the fly fishing forums, if any of you are reading this and have read the magazine, I hope you think I did the subject justice.