THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

I also put those same points and more to BRFC chairman Mike Heylin in a two part audio interview,
and while he as an individual was sympathetic, it's now 2015, and still nothing has changed.
Let's take a more detailed look now at some of the problems I highlighted in that presentation as to why
many anglers are no longer making claims, and sea anglers in particular, because coarse anglers don't
face the same in-boat weighing difficulties and potential need to kill situation often facing saltwater
anglers.
Two reasons in particular why claims are not forth coming are that, as previously stated, people don't
want to have to kill say a large bass or a tope to make a successful claim and are happy just to ignore
the records, and also, for some species, it is now illegal to bring them ashore anyway. They can be still
be fished for, weighed, and photographed, but must be returned alive at the point of capture.
Two working examples of this legislative protection are skate and tope. Yet the BRFC still insist in
their most recently published claims procedure that all potential record fish must be weighed on solid
ground, and not in a boat, if a claim is to be considered. Should that then be seen as an invitation to
commit an offence?. That's not for me to say. But certainly it could be interpreted that way.
When last approached by me on this
subject, the Scots were equally
unwilling to accept anything other than
records carefully weighed on firm
ground. Yet the Welsh are now quite
happy to stray from that requirement.
Ian Burrett - In boat weight estimation
So much so that they already have
records for tope and smoothhound
which weren't weighed on the shore,
all of which brings into doubt the
subject of Welsh national records
being slotted into the British or
European lists where the qualifying
rules are different, more of which
later. For now it's probably better not
to cloud the debate by wandering off
track.
Weight estimation charts can be extremely reflective. I have deliberately avoided the word accurate
here, because that in itself would be in-accurate.
The better ones have been painstakingly put together based on many hundreds of actual weighing and
measuring sessions across the entire size range for the species in question, and in so far as they are often
no more that just a few percentage points out when comparing estimated weights to actual weights, as
it's the same for everybody, where is the problem?.
People either accept that weight estimation for some species is the only way forward, or have a record
fish list in which certain categories are allowed to stagnate because claims can no longer be made,
despite fish bigger than the listed records quite legitimately being caught but could not be claimed.
It has to be said that weight is only one way of expressing the size of a fish. It's a good way, and one
we have all grown accustomed to so therefore feel comfortable with, but it does not have a monopoly.
In America for example, fish lengths, including a list of IGFA world records, are often given as a nose
to tail length measurement.
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