I’ve finally found a good little set of weighing scales that can live in my rucksack - weigh or measure?

As a group of enthusiasts who tend to obsess about the size of the quarry we chase, I find the increasing adoption of bass lengths as opposed to weights rather interesting. I am relatively comfortable giving myself an estimated weight for most of the bass I might be lucky enough to catch, but then I also accept that a magical double figure bass is a fish that really means something. Because we are mostly blokes who tend to fuss about sizes and lengths and whether a certain fish really was as big as so and so claims, is it really fair as such to claim the capture of an elusive and not remotely common 10lb+ bass via estimation or indeed measurement alone? On the other hand, does it actually matter and should we be growing the hell up a bit?

I talk from experience here because I caught a 79cms bass a few years ago which was measured but never weighed because neither of us had a set of scales with us. The capture of this fish didn’t change anything about my fishing and to this day I believe it was my first 10lb+ bass from the shore. I was never going to know 100% because the fish was measured and not weighed but it’s not the sort of thing I worry about. I got lucky, I was in the right place at the right time, and I landed what we would call a big bass. So what? I still went fishing the next day and didn’t enjoy the experience any less just because I didn’t land a fish like that again.

I notice that more and more anglers go out fishing and then say they have caught say a 56cm bass or a 72cm bass and so on. I personally think that measuring a bass to the tip of its tail is inherently flawed when compared to measuring to the fork of the tail anyway, but it’s only fishing and it doesn’t really matter. Anything to me that gets a fish measured and/or weighed and back in the water as quickly as possible is a good thing in my mind, and in the UK and Ireland I would guess that if an angler wants to then get a rough idea of the weight of said cm long bass they turn to the BASS conversion chart here or below which I hope is okay to screenshot. Please make sure to read the BASS blog post about how this conversion chart from cms to pounds and ounces came to be.

So my question here today apart from wanting to tell you about a little set of digital weighing scales is this - surely we can’t have it both ways but does it really matter anyway? If the size of fish we might catch continues to be a thing which I guess it will be because it’s how we tend to measure success in fishing, then surely if you want to know and indeed claim a capture to the fishing world you either measure or weigh and go with one or the other? As the BASS blog post says about the conversions from length to weight, “based on length alone, individual fish can vary by as much as plus or minus 30% of that average”. I don’t personally obsess about the size of my fish, but I do recognise how special a double figure bass is and for sure I’d love to catch a few more of them if they would like to jump on the end of my rod!

So the sticking point seems to be the magical “double figure bass” thing. Surely if anglers are increasingly measuring their bass then this needs to turn into say a magical “76cms+ long bass” or something like that as well? I know that some anglers will forever moan that some 76cm long bass might not actually weigh 10lbs and so on, but surely we need to get beyond this if more of you are going to measure fish? Surely we can’t have it both ways? Anglers who carry weighing scales can continue to claim the weight of a fish and anglers who carry a measuring tape can continue to claim the length of their fish. For sure the BASS conversion chart gives us a rough idea of what a bass might weigh for its length, but with how plenty of anglers bitch and moan that so and so bass at so and so cms long couldn’t have possibly weighed what is claimed on the chart, to me you’ve got a case of claim the measurement or claim the weight - but not both unless you have actually done both which I’d kinda suggest might be a lot to put a fish through if you intend to return it.

Which in turn leads me to a little set of not very expensive and very small digital weighing scales which I came across the other day and which now live in my rucksack together with what I think is a very lightweight and packable barbel weigh sling I picked up a while back and forgot that I had (you could just as easily use one of those longlife supermarket shopping bags to hold the fish for weighing, or use a landing net and remember to hit the tare button before weighing the fish, plus this specialist sling here might make sense but it’s too much for me to be stuffing in a rucksack together with camera gear etc.). The Berkley 25kg Digital Pocket Scale is really small and easy to use, and although they are £5 more expensive than the similar looking VMO Portable Electronic Scale, it’s a no-brainer to me with how the Berkley one does actually measure in true pounds and ounces - you know, 4lbs 12ozs etc. - unlike the VMO Portable Electronic Scale which is nice and small like the similar looking Berkley one but the VMO measures pounds and ounces in decimal points - say 4.6lbs which isn’t actually 4lbs 6ozs but is 4lbs + 0.6 of 16ozs - which you then need to convert to how we would quote pounds and ounces and to be perfectly honest it’s challenging my limited mathematical skills!

At the end of the day I don’t worry too much about what a bass might weigh or measure for various reasons, but of course there’s also a part of me that would like to know whether I did indeed capture a 10lb+ bass if something that size came along again one day - so for me I think it’s going to be a case of weighing the fish because this is what I am more used to. I think that weighing a fish you intend to return can be done just as safely and effectively as measuring it - I don’t simply stick the hook of the weighing scale into the jaw of the fish and hang it upright, please don’t do this! - indeed with how long I see some anglers messing around with tape measures and then photographing the bass lying there on the weed or rocks or sand, personally I think that keeping a bass in the water and putting it into a weigh sling or heavy duty plastic bag lessens the stress on fish which I am going to return, but of course I accept that some anglers like to eat the odd fish they catch and why the hell not?

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