CONGER EEL
We’ll start with a slippery customer you can find relatively close to shore, the snake-like conger eel. These creatures can grow to lengths of 2 metres and, though they’re slender form doesn’t give them an impressive weight, bringing one of them onto deck is an exciting experience as the eels writhes and wriggles on the end of the line. They are most at home around reefs and shipwrecks. Notorious for sharp teeth, they're the last thing that scuba divers hope to find when exploring sunken ships, so this is your chance to get one back on them!
Try contracting a fishing boat trip in Pembrokeshire if you’re keen to catch a conger eel, and you might be lucky enough to hook a ray, wrasse or mackerel as well.
GREAT BRITISH SHARKS
Now it’s time to get serious. Of the headline fish in the oceans, nothing beats sharks, and there are several species of these ocean giants that you can catch off the shores of the Uk and Ireland. Now, a lot of us have seen Jaws and will be thinking that this sounds like a bad idea. But rest assured, we’re not going after great white sharks or any other man eaters. That doesn’t mean that the fish in our sights aren’t impressive catches, on the list we find smoothhound, tope, porbeagles, blue shark and even thresher sharks with their incredible extended tail fins. All of these species can top 2 metres in length, while blue sharks regularly reach weights of 70 kilograms, with the British record weighing in at 116 kilograms!
The Irish Sea, the English Channel and the Bristol Channel are all good options for finding sharks, why not climb aboard a fishing boat in Devon and go sharking!
BLUEFIN TUNA
Surely you can’t catch anything bigger than a shark in the seas and oceans that surround the British Isles? In fact, there is something lurking out there that can tip the scales further than even the largest sharks - and you might be surprised to learn what it is. When most of us think of tuna, we think of small cans. Really, we should think of big fish! Bluefin tuna are powerful, ocean-going predators capable of leaping right out of the water in their hunting frenzies. While some mature examples are fairly modest in size, the largest of the Atlantic bluefin tuna fish can reach truly gigantic sizes - over 2.5 metres long and weighing a massive 250 kilograms - that’s a quarter of a metric ton!
If you can’t quite imagine pulling one of these monsters out of the water, you’ll have to see it to believe it. Try a tuna fishing trip in Cornwall!
EXTRA INFORMATION
Larger fish species always have small populations relative to the smaller ones. The fishing boat trips that we offer are recreational experiences which operate a catch-and-release policy when it comes to large fish. You might well take home a herring or sea bass for dinner, but don’t expect to tuck into any sharks or tuna that you catch.
Big fish records are slippery things. Apart from the Ballantine salmon mentioned above, there is a story of 388 lb sturgeon - that’s 176 kilograms - being caught on the River Towy in South Wales in 1933, though the only scales present were on the fish. Wels catfish are said to reach 2 metres or more in length and weigh 65 kilograms or more, but reliable, verified data is hard to come by.
As far as record-breaking ocean-going fish are concerned, the largest porbeagle caught in British waters weighed 230 kilograms. It was found off the Orkney islands, Scotland. The largest ever tuna from this part of the world was caught off Ireland and weighed 440 kilograms.
But the overall record - and this is really quite hard to believe - goes to a six-gill shark caught in the Atlantic ocean, far off the coast of County Clare, Ireland. These are deep-sea creatures, and the specimen that Joe Waldis landed in 2009 weighed almost half a ton - 480 kilograms. More information on this catch, and about releasing large fish after catching them, was reported by the Belfast Telegraph.
