Who doesn’t love a good fishing story? Salty men telling stories of adventure out on the even saltier seas. Perhaps I was inspired from reading Hemingway’s “The Old Man and The Sea,” which is a story of an old man on the sea (only his adventure takes a turn when he reels in the biggest swordfish anyone’s ever seen). I love the competitiveness of fishing. I love how fishermen exaggerate their catches. I love when their exaggerations are actually true. An event in the adventure of big game fishing has taken place. Some may believe that it’s an exaggeration, but no sir, a new standard has been set as the largest fish on the shores of the United Kingdom has been caught.
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Filming in Caicos
It took over 2 hours to land the sucker, that sucker being a common skate, which are endangered. This common skate measured out to 88.5 inches lengthwise and 66.75 inches in width. In order to weigh a fish, the fish will end up dying, and seeing as this fish is a member of an endangered species, killing it would be in poor sport. Instead, a weight is estimated from the measurements of its size, and this fish has been estimated to have weighed 208 pounds. Having to guess the weight of the fish means that the catch has an unofficial record, but since the situation of being unable to officially weigh a fish happens often enough, fisherman still respect the score.
The man who caught the fish and broke the record is a 26 year old named Daniel Bennett. He caught the fish with some mackerel bait off the coast of the Isle of Skye, Scotland. His secret was patience, which isn’t secret to fisherman at all. Some days you get lucky and some days you don’t, that’s part of the adventure of fishing. You can go anywhere around the world, and you still might come up empty. There are many ways to fish. The key is persistence. You keep trying and someday you might pull in a big one, perhaps not as big as Daniel’s, but anytime you land a fish, it’s a success.
Photo Courtesy of www.planetseafishing.com
