Last time out with Keith we wound up in the Greyhound for a post-session drink and the conversation got around to the apparent size of fish when seen swimming in water and their actual size when on the bank. We discussed how fish look an awful lot smaller 'in' than 'out', in fact we agreed, the difference is remarkable
and is due to refraction bending light and making the fish appear much shallower in depth than it actually is.
I remarked that my near two pound roach from the canal caught last winter was very nearly as long from the tip of its tail to the end of its snout as the distance from the crook of my elbow to the tip of my fingers. As I said this, I looked at my arm and thought "that's an awful lot for a roach!"
Keith was sceptical, and I must admit, so was I! Just your old anglers natural flair for exaggeration under the influence of alcohol kicking in, of course...
Then I came across an article in one of Kev's old 'The Art of Fishing Magazines' kindly loaned and delved through ever since. This article concerns Ray Clarke's capture of what was back in 1990, a new British record roach from the Dorset Stour. The trophy pictures of this fish are deceiving; it just does not look four pounds in weight and that's probably because we cant tell how big Ray is! The only item that scales the whole picture is a set of what are almost certainly Avon brand dial scales on the floor, but they are angled to the lens so foreshortening makes them unreliable as a measuring stick. On the next page is a picture of the fish lying on the ground with a tape measure drawn along its flank. The measurement from the tip of the snout to the fork in the tail is seventeen and half inches and the fish is approximately seven inches deep. It looks bigger here, Rays hand is in the picture, but as we have already said, we don't know how big Ray is! Also, a tape measure, accurate though it is, still gives no real sense of scale in a picture.
Of course this is the whole problem with the shooting of specimen fish pictures - if you're lucky the fish looks big, and if not then it looks smaller than it really is - hence the old trick of holding fish out from the body!
Just for fun, try estimating the weights of fish in this picture of two black bream about to be prepared for lunch...
By the way the filleting knife is a big one as filleting knives go...
Actually it's a boning knife! and they are bigger on the whole than filleting knives, but that still don't help you at all, does it? Confuses the issue actually because it could still be any reasonable size between the outside limits of boning knife sizes, in a picture...
Now I'll tell you that the bigger fish weighed three pounds and four ounces before gutting...
So, now you have one known fact, what did the smaller fish weigh before gutting?
Wait for it...
I'll bet you were far out and guessed somewhere around the two pound mark?
It was just over a pound and a bit.
The big fish comfortably fed three people and the small fish was a meal for one. In the hand the difference was enormous, striking, the one fish was chunky and fat, a mature fish all muscle and power, the other by comparison slight and rakish. In fact the difference in scale between the two is actually very close to the difference in scale between the two roach we are talking about here, as I will now explain...
Ray's record roach really would have fit into the crook of my arm and not only would it do that comfortably but it would also reach past the end of my outstretched digits with the end of the tail hanging over another inch and a half! Now, that's a sense of scale! And that's a very big roach!
Intrigued now, I measured my 'tiddler' against the known length of the set of scales I had placed alongside the fish in one of the pictures I took of it and found some surprising facts. My fish was only a few inches shorter than the record breaker, in fact if I were to chop off the record breakers tail then my fish would be the same length in total. Not a lot of difference you might think, but, actually it makes a considerable difference to the weight. My fish was approximately fifteen inches in length and five inches or so deep. The difference between 17.5 x 7 and 15 x 5 being a full two pounds and five ounces!
So, Keith was right after all, my fish would not quite make the distance I had estimated in the pub, but I really wasn't that far out, was I?
The upshot of all of this is that the size that really matters here are the lengths of both fish, only a few inches different, because, as Keith and I had discussed in the pub, the apparent length of a fish seen in water does not differ much from its actual length, but its apparent depth shrinks considerably whichever way you spy the fish and the effect worsens the further away from the fish you are when viewing it.
So, you may have thought that that roach you once saw far off toward the other bank was a good two pounder, but, unless you had something in the water very nearby to scale it against, say a handy box of matches on its way to the sea and passing right over its head just as you spied the fish, and because the difference between a specimen roach of two pounds plus and a record worrying fish of over four is only a few inches of length then you may have been very, very wrong. It might well have been a proper record breaker!
But remember this one thing. And, I am willing to to eat my favourite fishing hat and supply the gruesome evidence of that act, if anyone can ever prove it wrong!
Even though you may cast after that big roach on the horizon and even catch if you are lucky, you will never, ever, because they are far too clever, catch the biggest roach in any shoal...
That is, unless you catch the lot.
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