Bradan wrote:The run in Galway this year has been absolutely brilliant - and I fully believe its down to the nets being gone.
BTW, if you think a 28lbs salmon is big, I just heard there was a salmon taken in a bag net in Norway recently that weighed 37 kilos!
this is the link for that
http://www.fishandfly.com/articles/atla-salmon
also found this there too
http://www.fishandfly.com/articles/20080716
Mollie Fitzgerald with her magnificent 54lb Atlantic salmon
[img]http://www.fishandfly.com/custom/54lbsalmon-550.jpg[/img]
On 28th June 2008, co-owner of Frontiers, aged 45, Mollie Fitzgerald landed a 54 lbs salmon on the Alta river, Norway. The fish took a well-known pattern, the Mikkeli Blue in a pool called Ovre Sierra. The fly was surprisingly small (1-1/2" length) considering the fact that the river was essentially in flood at over 6.5 ft on the gauge. There was only a small window on the inside corner of the pool where fish might lie and the big one was in the 5 star hotel! Mollie also caught fish of 35lbs and 24lbs that night. 113lbs of salmon!
As Mollie described to Fish&Fly, 'The fish took on the dangle, as they do in high water, and left the pool for Nedre (Lower) Sierra, a run of some hundreds of yards down some big rapids in high water. We were left paddling hard and starting the engine to keep up . there is no way the fish would have been landed without the skills of my boatmen Tronde and Frode Simensen . he fought it for 45 minutes . less than the pound a minute rule!'
Ovre or Upper Sierra was described by a famous Alta fisherman, Hamilton Dalrymple, in his diaries of the 1920.s as a great low water pool but then he notes in the margin 'we now know that it is a good high water pool also' - He too caught a 54lbs fish there.
Surely this must be the largest Atlantic salmon caught on fly in recent times by a lady rod?
The fish was released safely. Well done Mollie on this magnificent catch & release.