Tony Unwin spent 25 minutes reeling in the biggest cod ever caught in Scottish waters, breaking a record that has stood for 51 years.
He netted the 4ft-long fish, which weighed 49lb, three lb more than the existing record, off Muckle Flugga in the Shetland Islands. Unwin and Kenny Graham, the boat’s skipper, suspected that it could be a record, which was confirmed when they brought it to port.
Unwin, 60, a window-fitter from Amble in Northumberland who has travelled to Shetland for fishing expeditions for the past eight years, used the trusty rod of his late fisherman friend Bob White to catch the fish, which was tempted by his mackerel bait.
“It didn’t seem that big at first but then when I started to reel it in I thought ‘this is a really, really big fish’, ” Unwin said on Friday. “I took my time to reel it in because I didn’t want to lose it and when I saw its head come out of the water I couldn’t believe the size of it. Kenny said straight away that it could be a record. I was absolutely wrecked afterwards and had pins and needles in my hands and arms.”
It took four hours for Unwin to be able to return to the fishing village of Cullivoe in northeast Shetland to confirm the record. He said: “I thought that if it wasn’t a record it was still a really big fish and was still well pleased with it. But I was over the moon when I saw the scales at 49lb. It was like winning a gold medal in the Olympics. We had a few gins when we got back to celebrate.”
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The huge fish is now on ice awaiting verification from officials of the British Record Fish Committee. The previous record for a cod caught in Scottish waters was 46lb, logged as having been caught by B Baird in the Gantocks, in the Firth of Clyde. It is estimated that Unwin’s cod is big enough for about 40 fillets to be cut from it and would be worth about £450.
Graham, the skipper of the charter boat Oberon, said: “We were fishing an area of ground north of Shetland that had been producing cod of over 30lb, but we knew that the record fish was down there waiting to be caught.
“It took Tony 25 hard minutes to boat the fish, and when we put it on the scales it was bouncing between 40lb and 53lb so it was impossible to give a proper weight. But we knew it was something special. As a potential record fish we brought it back to the pier to officially weigh it, and it came in at 49lb. Everyone was delighted for Tony when we knew it was a record.”
The biggest cod ever caught in the UK stands at 58lb 6oz and was caught off Whitby, East Yorkshire, in 1992.
In 2018, a Scottish angler snared the biggest skate fish ever caught in the world — an 8ft 3in whopper that weighed 300lb.
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Hamish Currie, the 59-year-old fisherman, spent more than an hour hauling in the fish, which had a “wingspan” of 7ft. The “once in a lifetime” catch off the coast of Portrush, Northern Ireland, took 65 minutes to reel in, and is the largest ever giant common skate recorded in the world. The previous record was logged in 2014, when a fish weighing 208lbs and measuring 7ft 3in long was caught off the Isle of Skye.
The biggest ever catch in UK waters is believed to be a 505lb bluefin tuna landed by Andrew Alsop, off the coast of Neyland, near Pembrokeshire, in 2017, but the true weight was never confirmed as the fish was then returned to the water.
The record therefore remains with a a 169lb 6oz skate caught in 1994 and the largest boat-caught record is a bluefin tuna of 851lb caught by Lorenzo Henry-Mitchell, off the coast of Whitby in 1933, which remains the biggest ever rod-and-line catch in British waters.
The world record at present for a cod is 103lb, which was for a specimen caught in 2013 off Norway.