THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

charter boat skippers for fish left on the boat are not that brilliant either. Far better to put them back if
we could.
The Americans have worked out how to do this sort of thing with some of their pressure blown species
such as amberjacks, which tagged recaptures have shown does at least provide some measure of
survivability.
So perhaps there's a Ph. D project here begging for some academic angler to explore the survivability
chances of this and other species too, including ballan wrasse and pollack, and how best to deal with
fish that have suffered the bends.
TORSK Brosme brosme
Bucket List status – result outside of home waters
Don Matthews, Norway Torsk
Imagine a ling with a shorter stumpier body than normal,
and just one single long continuous dorsal fin. In fact, the
only member of the cod family to have just a single dorsal
fin. In a nutshell, that's the torsk.
It still has the chin barbel and the lighter, almost white
edging to its fringing fins that are so characteristic of the
ling, the ling also having a separate short rounded first
dorsal fin ahead of the long continuous run.
Even the colouration is not that dissimilar, though it leans
more toward bronze brown in the torsk and a lighter
greenish brown for the ling. A fish with a much more
northerly distribution and deeper water preference than
the ling, which while this takes in some Scottish and
western Irish waters, even there it is never common.
The furthest south I personally have come across torsk is
out from Kylesku in north west Scotland. As I arrived
there the afternoon before I was scheduled to fish a
couple of days for haddock, I met the boat in that evening
to see how they'd gone on. They had taken a lot of
haddock, but had also spent a bit of time fishing around
a wreck where they had picked up several torsk.
Another place I've seen them brought in by anglers on
fish baits is Shetland, a fact reflected in the record lists. They also catch a few in the Pentland Firth. But
if you want to catch them virtually to order, then go up into the Arctic.
We fished 198 miles north of the Arctic circle in Lyngen Fjord where you was virtually guaranteed
torsk if you allowed a fish bait to touch bottom. To put it bluntly, they were a nuisance. We even had a
few on the pirks, with some good ones amongst them going up to 23½ pounds.
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