I'll set the scene. It's winter and I am trotting down the river (who knew!) catching a mix of the usual river species when my little wire stemmed stick float goes under and I get the low pull of a small barbel, there were many small barbel in this stretch of the River Lea and I thought this was one of them, that was until I swung it to hand and could see it was a clonking gonk, it was almost heavy enough to net I thought at the time so I took some photos.
I've seen some pictures of other big gudgeon which are usually held by the small hands of a child thus making a size reference hard but I had to make do with my own mitts. I thought about doing one of those silly arms length photos you see where the captor has a little tiny head, then I could jokingly claim the first double figure goby, but at the time I didn't realise the gudgeon record was only 5oz so it went back unweighed. Doh!
The fish wasn't long but was very chunky, after weighing many other species it doesn't take long to work out that the heavy fish are the deep, fat ones, no doubt it had been feeding up on the pellets as you can sometimes get gudgeon on a 4mm or even 6mm pellet here. It had an impressive girth, it's funny how often those two words combine albeit usually in other contexts, you don't have a meagre girth or a slight girth after all, I'm not sure I have anything that requires that word although I'm working on it with my stomach, much like Sherman. She was built like a tank and was the width of a golf ball along the belly and flank, hence the name, this fish had girth and plenty of it.
Since then I have bought scales that weigh in grams just to see what a gudgeon like that would weigh but it's sods law that I haven't even got close to catching one since that would be worthy of any WW2 tank based nickname. That's fishing for you and you have to have a laugh, I tell myself this every night as I cry into the pillow lamenting my lost glory.
Sherman lives on now only in the memory but every now and then I like to envisage the scenario where the fish was immortalised in angling history. Youth would stop me in the street and go " You dat guy!" Specimen hunters would follow me from my house to a fishery somewhere, but I would foil them by going to a place that held record minnow. Lines of bivvies would be on the river for a few weeks with anglers asking "Caught much?" only to be replied with "Nah been plagued by nuisance barbel and carp" I could say she was caught in a Thames tributary, or even better tell a fib and mention the Grand Union Canal, one of the notorious tiny gudgeon stretches near my home, I could then walk by with my Angling Herald Specimen Trophy Fish of the Week cap.
Perhaps it was better I put Sherman back unweighed, it would have all been too much.😄
Edit ) I have since measured Sherman retrospectively using a ruler placed over my hand on the same angle (scientific I know) and she measured around six and a half to seven inches, head to tip of tail, turns out that's quite a decent length for a gudgeon, throw in her double decker body and I think there's some weight there for sure.
