By Ken Bell, angling correspondent

THE NEWS that Miss Georgina Ballantine’s longstanding British record had been broken, headlined in many of the English tabloids, came as shock to most Tay salmon anglers.

Especially when it was revealed that the new record fish, weighing 66 pounds, was caught in Bluebell Lake, Oundle, Cambridgeshire—not one of the world’s best known salmon beats.

It was only well into most of the reports that it was revealed the fish caught, again by a woman angler, was a catfish.

And it was caught by a method which in Scotland would be termed a “set line”, with the fish hooking itself when the angler was in bed in her tent.

Congratulations to Mrs Bev Street on landing her fish—which looks like something out of a nightmare—for it put up quite a tussle.

But, as most records compare like for like, in no way does it beat Miss Ballantine’s 1922 record salmon of 64lb.

It would be interesting to see what weight the “heaviest British freshwater fish” was when it was stocked in the Cambridgeshire water and how much protein-rich bait it had been fed with.