THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Dove-tailing very nicely into this story, also around that time, I had just gotten to know Dr. Dietrich
Burkel from Glasgow, who was about to become the Scottish Federation of Sea Anglers (SFSA) fish
recorder.
Dietrich had been looking long and hard at the list he would inherit, and had expressed grave doubts
about a number of its inclusions, one being a spotted ray of something like sixteen pounds, which also
held the British and European records at the same time.
I don't know the politics here. But I do know the outcome. The suspect inclusions were all given the
elbow. In the case of the so called spotted ray record, mainly because of its size which was way too big
for such a small growing species, plus some uncertainty apparently regarding official identification.
As a result, that record slot, in the company of a few others, was thrown open to claims, and I was
subsequently invited by Dietrich to submit my fish, which I did, as I fortuitously had all the relevant
support data in place which so easily might not have been the case. In fact, it wasn't the case when the
BRFC later ejected the standing sandy ray record, more of which later.
What I didn't initially appreciate here was that as part of a knock on process, I was also about to take
the British and European records too, all in one fell swoop.
To some extent, and for quite a wide
range of reasons, depending on
species and where it's caught, that
sort of multiple record slot filling
wouldn't automatically happen today.
Many anglers are now no longer
willing to kill inedible fish simply to
see their name on a list, and every
credit to them for that.
Unfortunately, and to some extent I
can understand why, national fish
recorders seem completely unwilling
to accept rule changes to the extent
that in many anglers eyes, and sea
anglers in particular, records have
become something of an irrelevance.
Another of my Scottish influences, Dr. Dietrich Burkel
Most anglers these days prefer to concentrate on personal bests, based either on weights they obtain
outside of the prescribed rules such weighing in a boat, which the BRFC would find totally
unacceptable, or in the case of large fish such as skate, derived from very well prepared weight
estimation charts based on empirical measurements, which again, fish recorders say are not good
enough.
If anglers are not prepared to claim records for whatever reason, and these days there are many who
won't, then what is the value of an official record to those record holders who are willing to jump
through all the necessary hoops, when everyone knows there have been bigger fish which for
conservation reasons weren't claimed.
Quite simply, it devalues the standing records. So in their current format, record fish lists are
meaningless. What they need is a good shake up to reflect what modern anglers want as opposed to
what out of date fish recorders think they want. A point I put to the British Record Fish Committee
(BRFC) in the format of a scientific paper in 2009 exploring the many problems they must face up to,
while at the same time offering potential workable alternatives.
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