“Anglers everywhere have a habit of adding extra pounds and inches!”
HAT IS it with anglers and their catch boasts? It is completely forgiveable to get excited. That’s why we go fishing in the first place.
It’s not a shooting offence to imagine that the last fish you lost was the catch of a lifetime. But serial, habitual exaggeration is another matter.
Again, it’s not on a par with GBH or housebreaking, but it’s pretty much everywhere you go. Two-pound perch magically become threes and fours. Every other pike “must have been a twenty”. On a river where a 3lb chub is a monster, the local old duffer mysteriously always bags five-pounders. Meanwhile, he swears that the half-acre puddle up the road holds 2lb roach.
I’ve recently come to a conclusion: either I’m the unluckiest man alive, or anglers everywhere have a habit of adding extra pounds and inches!
WPeople are either not very handy with scales or a tape measure, or they round up weights as readily as they hold their catch out so far to the camera it enters a different county.
Naturally, because so much of angling is based on hearsay and trust, you could say this game is inevitable. It just doesn’t happen in other sports. You can’t say that your local football team won 7-0 when the real score line is there in black and white.
Perhaps the most telling evidence of habitual exaggeration I ever encountered was on a Finnish river with meticulous catch records. The owner could virtually describe every big trout to the nearest dappled spot. On average, he told me, visiting anglers added at least two inches to their catches. And this was Scandinavia, home to some of the quietest and most modest anglers on the planet!
Let’s get some perspective here, however, even if others can’t. Life is too short to get cross about something as insignificant as the weight of a modest, cold-blooded animal.
So rather than scathe and spit, why don’t we just poke some fun instead? The next time you hear a “creative” catch report on your patch, I dare you to play a little game.
When the local knowit-all says he’s had another 6lb chub, just answer in the same currency. Nod sagely and say “good to see that the small ones are biting” or “you should have seen the one I lost last week. It weighed 11lb and spoke Portuguese.”
Actually, it’s probably best of all to just smile sweetly and feel a quiet solidarity with anglers everywhere who are able to humour the local Hans Christian Andersen with good grace, even when their claims are Donald Trump-level cattle poo.
Anyhow, that pike I lost last weekend was a 30-pounder if it was an ounce. And I’m a teetotaller who never told a lie in his life.