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Angling records are there to be broken: they are not written in stone, but some do seem to be made from silly putty, hand moulded and remoulded.
Starting in 1988, and for about a decade, I worked along with the Alberta Fish and Game Association and Alberta’s Fish and Wildlife Division to co-ordinate, rationalize, document and tidy up the keeping of what are variously called the Alberta Angling or Sportfishing Records. It was a decade of fascinating work that gave me a magazine article each year. |
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The first efforts resulted in the removal, for the first time ever from the records, of a fish that had long rankled many anglers, particularly a surprisingly large number of perch fans. In 1976, a 14 year old lad caught a three-pound, 10-ounce fish in Sylvan Lake and immediately cooked and ate it. Eventually, through a series of after the fact investigations of highly circumstantial evidence and prodded by some adults, someone determined that that the fish “must have been a perch” and the new Alberta record perch at that.
Such a silly putty process does not produce credible records, particularly for the hard core perch fishermen, who asserted, flatly, that “there are no three pound perch in Alberta.”
So, in 1988, fish and wildlife decided that the fish was more likely a walleye, and it is just not good enough for the establishment of provincial records that someone says they think they ate a record something or other, and restored the previous Alberta record perch to its rightful place. Today, 23 years later, the Alberta record perch is two pounds, 15.5 ounces. |
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