THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

All very confusing and still early days yet in trying to untangle the situation, not helped by the many
similarities between the two species. NOTE: From here on in and elsewhere in the book, I am still
going to refer to the two as common skate.
When I first started fishing, Shetland and Orkney were the top home waters venues for huge skate.
There probably are still skate to be caught at both these locations, and as likely as not, access as much
as decline will have played some part in reduced visitor participation.
I fished both locations when they were in their hey day, and while Orkney fell well short of expectation,
Dury Voe in Shetland produced some very good fish, which in the company of a bonus one hundred
and sixty seven pound halibut on one of the skate baits, were all brought to the scales, a practise
regularly repeated elsewhere at the time.
Is it any wonder then that population
numbers started to crash, sounding alarm
bells in the corridors of academia hundreds
of miles to the south in Glasgow. For it was
there that the first tentative moves towards
skate conservation were made.
Dr. Dietrich Burkel & Ian Burrett, Crinan
Instrumental amongst other people in all of
this was Dr. Dietrich Burkel, who I talked
with at length on the subject in 2013 just
before his death. A day when with a touch
of both irony and justice, his last ever fish
turned out to be a male skate of just over a
hundred pounds which he and Ian Burrett
tagged and released.
To cut a long story short, back in those earliest days, catch and release, tagging, and measurement data,
were all collected and put on file at Glasgow museum where Dietrich worked. And there they remained
for many years, long after his departure back to Germany until Brian Little and Davy Holt took the
project over, adding much more data of their own from fish brought aboard Davy's boat based at
Lochaline on the Sound of Mull.
This ultimately lead to the compilation of the separate weight estimation tables for both male and female
fish which most anglers happily use today, and which are said to be accurate to within around 5%. Not
that this has cut any ice with the various record fish committee's.
They still insist that all fish are brought ashore and weighed on firm ground as part of their record claims
procedure rules, putting them squarely at odds with the law, which states that all so called common
skate must be returned at the point of capture.
Despite this, in the years before legal protection, Bill and Davy pressed on compiling the two separate
weight estimation charts, because not only are the sexes proportioned slightly differently, but their
maximum growth potential differs greatly too.
It's the females that are potentially the big ones. Males rarely exceed around one hundred and forty
pounds, and would be more typically nearer the hundred pound mark. Females on the other hand have
the capacity to well top three hundred pounds.
To compensate, despite the size differential, male fish often give a far better account of themselves
when hooked. Another point worth mentioning here is that when you find a productive area, segregation
of the sexes can also be evident, with the males forming small pods well away from where the females
are foraging.
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