A professional Italian fisherman just reeled a 9-foot catfish out of a river that just last year was suffering so badly from Europe’s heatwave that in some places it had dried out almost completely.
As long as a U-Haul truck, he released the fish in order to allow such a specimen to continue influencing the ecosystem.
The true river monster was a giant wels catfish, and Alessandro Biancardi was alone when he had the first inklings that whatever it was that had tugged on his line on May 25th was not going to come quietly.
What was just another normal day on the Po River quickly turned into a battle as Biancardi struggled against the fish whilst negotiating sunken hazards and strong currents.
“The fear of losing it almost sent me into a panic,” he writes on the website of his fishing team, Madcat. “I was alone facing the biggest catfish I [had] ever seen in 23 years.”
Exhausted, he eventually took the beast to shallow water where he was able to land it. It was at that point that he became so preoccupied with the fish that he forgot to moor his boat, which drifted away with all his belongings.
Rushing to tie the fish up, and recovered his boat and called a friend that was staying nearby at a fishing camp full of people like him who had been hoping to land one of the Po’s famous catfish.
With 10 witnesses, Ale whipped out his measuring tape—9 feet 4 inches (285 cm) the biggest in his life, and, according to Madcat, the world.
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He sent the measurements to the International Game Fish Association for consideration for the catch-and-release record. Madcat says it has beaten the previous record by 4 cm.
“I was very curious about the weight but I feared too much to stress that rare specimen,” wrote Biancardi, explaining that he then let it back into the river.
Many fear the already drought-stricken river will suffer further still after a dry winter, but the Po, which Virgil described as the king of rivers, (Fluvious rex) still has an ecosystem intact enough to produce monsters
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