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Big Fish

Our March 2000 contribution from Jon Beer

I'm not much of a big fish man, myself. I have nothing against big fish, I welcome them heartily when they come along but I don't go out of my way to look them up. I don't know the reason for this but I'm sure a good psychiatrist could help. I think it may be because I have a sneaking suspicion that I have very little control over the size of fish that latches itself onto my fly and that as long as I catch enough my fair share of big ones will come along - particularly if pretend that I don't really want one.

But in the last few days big fish have been waving their arms in the air and calling "Me, Sir" from the back of the class and generally drawing attention to themselves. So let us talk of big fish and the bizarre.

New Zealand has always had more than its fair share of big trout. It is nature's way of inducing people to live in New Zealand. And this year nature has a special offer on: it is giving away bigger and better trout to the fishermen of the south island. In the north of the island trout records are being broken right and left - the result, apparently, of a plague of mice. A mild winter and a bumper beech blossom season have caused an explosion in the mouse population. Stranger still, the mice have taken to swimming the rivers and lakes where the trout have been gulping them down and getting very large in the process. There are stories in the local newspapers of monster trout from the rivers in the Marlborough region. Further south, the Timaru Herald has a couple of Dunedin anglers clutching a brown trout of over twenty pounds from Lake Ruataniwha. I can foresee problems if something similar happens over here and the Great Hampshire Mouse Plague causes a glut of mouse-fattened brownies on the rarefied waters of the English chalkstreams. Does a concoction of fur to imitate a mouse qualify as a fly on fly-only waters? What if is mouse fur? What if it is a mouse? Perhaps it is alright as long as it is a dry mouse and cast upstream.

There are much bigger fish to be found a lot nearer to home. The recent New Year floods in southern France swamped a fish farm near the mouth of the Gironde river, releasing several thousand fish, valued at 200,000 into the swollen waters. But these were not escapee rainbows or farmed salmon. They were sturgeon. And sturgeon can grow very large indeed. The Russian sturgeon of the Black Sea and its rivers grows up to 200lbs but Beluga Sturgeon of the Caspian and the inland seas of Asia have reached over three thousand pounds. My encyclopaedia of such things notes that their size nowadays is "mostly 150-200Kg or under ". But even that will pull your string a bit. Sturgeon make excellent eating. This week the Daily Telegraph reported that French fishermen are already out in force trying to catch themselves a sturgeon. The environmental concern is that these Russian sturgeon will interbreed with the few European or Common sturgeon, Acipenser sturio , that still swim the Gironde to spawn. The Common sturgeon once spawned in all the major rivers of Western Europe. Many years ago I recall an item in one of the Sunday colour supplements. It was an old sepia photograph of a fisherman on, I think, the River Teifi in west Wales. Beside him, and towering over him by some way, is a sturgeon that took the worms he was fishing for salmon. For several hours he was a very scared fisherman indeed which just shows what can happen if you worm for salmon. If anyone has any more details of this event I would be embarrassingly grateful to receive them.

We are nothing if not global this month. A third big fish story comes from the Boy's Own Adventure country of the Amazon. Jeremy Wade is a fisherman in that same mould. In 1992 he wrote, with Paul Boote, Somewhere Down the Crazy River , a description of harrowing adventures in the remote regions of India after the mighty mahseer and even more harrowing adventures in even remoter regions of the Congo after the nightmare-jawed Goliath Tigerfish.

This time, his quarry in the Amazon rainforest was the giant Pirarucu or Arapaima . This little number preys on the huge armoured catfish of the region. Like the hero of any good Boy's Own adventure, it has a cunning plan. The pirarucu haunts the pools of the flooded forest. As the water warms and shrinks the catfish become lethargic in the diminishing oxygen supply, falling easy prey to the giant pirarucu which can gulp air from the surface. Clever stuff. Before the introduction of metal-tipped spears and monofilament nets the pirarucu was almost invulnerable, growing slowly to a massive 15 feet, perhaps 700 lbs. Even now specimens of 400lbs exist but they are becoming increasing rare with hunting pressure and environmental damage. Jeremy eventually located a small population in an isolated forest pool. A plank built canoe had to be dragged through four miles of forest to fish the water. The result of the expedition was seven pirarucu up to forty pounds.

Now, back to sanity and the start of another trout fishing season. Good luck.

Thanks to Dan Metcalfe for this follow up:

Further to your excellent article in fishandfly.co.uk, I have found an account of the sturgeon caught in Wales in Jeremy Paxman's 'Fish, fishing and the meaning of Life' on Pages 318-323. The Royal Sturgeon was caught by Alec Allen in 1933 on the River Towy, at Nantgaredig, near Carmarthen. It was nine feet two inches long, had a girth of 59 inches, and weighed 388 pounds! The article was published in the Sunday Telegraph by Byron Rogers. If you cannot get hold of a copy, please email me and I can get the gist of it to you. Tight lines, Dan Metcalfe

Jon Beer contributes regularly to publications including Trout & Salmon and The Telegraph. If you have any comments, do not hesitate to get in touch or use the message board.