By CAM Staff
How’s this for a bucket-list fish?
There is a potential new all-tackle world length record for Siberian taimen. According to the International Game Fish Association’s Facebook page, Maxim Mamaev caught this 156-centimeter (more than 61-inch) fish while fly fishing Russia’s Tugur River. If approved, it will best the previous record by 16 centimeters (about 6 inches).
Siberian taimen are the largest, most ferocious species of salmonid on the planet. Growing to weights in excess of 100 pounds, they look and behave like giant trout and feed on fish, ducks and small mammals like muskrats. Their home waters are the rivers of northeast Asia, where they can live up to 50 years.
Over the last few decades, the rise of taimen as a spectacular gamefish is a good thing. They have been fished and dammed almost to extinction across much of their native range. There are just a few large and remote drainages left where they thrive in Mongolia and Russia, and their appeal as a sportfish, especially for fly anglers, has helped develop strict regulations to protect them.
The Tugur River is home to the largest Siberian taimen in the world. Isolated in Russia’s Far East, it feeds the Sea of Okhotsk and runs through an 80,000-acre nature reserve that protects many species of fish, including the Pacific salmon that pile into the river in late summer to spawn.
It doesn’t hurt that much of the drainage is accessible to anglers only by helicopter, but the salmon run definitely contributes to the unparalleled growth of Tugur taimen. The nutrient transfer from saltwater to fresh during a large salmon run is well documented. Everything feeds on salmon and their eggs, and large taimen are capable of gorging on whole adult salmon.
The current world record Siberian taimen by weight was caught on a fly by taimen researcher Matt Sloat on the Tugur. That fish, caught in 2018, weighed 101 pounds. There are multiple un-certified Tugur taimen reported to weigh into the 150-pound range. According to National Geographic, the largest Siberian taimen ever caught weighed 231 pounds and stretched a tape to 83 inches.
It is rare, however, for anglers to encounter taimen of such enormous size. With such long lives, they grow slowly, and the larger individuals are old and wise. Most taimen caught on the fly weigh less than 20 pounds.
But you can keep those 100-pounders in the back of your mind when you’re packing up your 9-weight rod for a trip to Siberia.