Unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock submerged in Norway\u2019s Alta River and have gills, you probably missed the news announced in a press-release-style note last month. \u201cLargest Atlantic Salmon Landed in 2025,\u201d the headline read. Underneath, the note elaborated that \u201c250 miles inside of the Arctic Circle at around two o\u2019clock in the morning with a still tall midnight sun overhead, Edward L. Shugrue III feels a slight touch at the end of his fly-line.\u201d The toucher: a fifty-two-pound Atlantic salmon, one of the largest ever caught. The touchee: Shugrue, a fifty-nine-year-old mutual-fund guy.<\/p>\n
The correspondent? \u201cI wrote it,\u201d Shugrue said recently, in the living room of his apartment on Park Avenue. \u201cIt took, like, a week to process, but I was flying home and I thought, Holy Christ, this is a real fucking fish.\u201d You catch the big fish so you can talk about catching the big fish. Shugrue, who had mostly white hair and a salmon-colored shirt (unintentional), was telling the tale before a plate of smoked striper from his fishmonger in Amagansett. \u201cI thought about serving salmon because we\u2019re talking about salmon, but I really can\u2019t do it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
To fish the Alta, which has some of the biggest salmon in the world, you need a \u201crod.\u201d Shugrue\u2019s rod grants him angling rights for a section of river for six days every year. Fewer than a hundred rods exist. \u201cThey\u2019re handed down, father to son,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cI\u2019ve heard stories\u2014wealthy, keen anglers\u2014letting it be known, \u2018Hey, I\u2019d pay a million bucks for a rod.\u2019 Actual numbers today, it\u2019s like buying into a golf club.\u201d Shugrue bought his, in 2019, from an heirless angler friend. (There\u2019s also a public lottery.)<\/p>\n
The Alta was hot this year. The week before Shugrue arrived, a forty-pounder was caught by a Russian oligarch. \u201cHe\u2019s what I would call a good oligarch,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cBig salmon conservationist.\u201d Shugrue had invited his friend Tiggy Pettifer. She was the assistant to Prince Charles and a companion to William and Harry. Shugrue felt the slight touch on the first day. He got a piece of string to demonstrate. \u201cYou\u2019re the angler, and I\u2019m the fish,\u201d he said. He touched the string slightly. Afterward, the fish took off. Two boatmen, rowing a wooden canoe, chased it a mile downstream. Thirty minutes later, Shugrue had his fish.<\/p>\n
Pettifer took photos of Shugrue and the two boatmen. \u201cI love Tiggy to death, but most people make a small fish look big,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cShe made a big fish look small. But, if you look at my hand, you see the girth is absurd. It\u2019s a twenty-nine-inch girth. What\u2019s Kate Moss? Twenty?\u201d They let the fish go.<\/p>\n
Shugrue and Pettifer met several years ago, at a dinner for the Atlantic Salmon Trust, a conservation group. \u201cTiggy was my tablemate,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cI had a very good seat. It was me, Tiggy, Prince Charles, George Percy, who will be the next Duke of Northumberland, and to his left was King Harald of Norway.\u201d He learned that he and Harald used the same boatmen. \u201cThere was no question at the time, King Harald was the king at the table. Very regal bearing. Now, mind you, I think he has an easier job. If you had to be king, I\u2019d take King of Norway. Charles\u2014this is the thing I couldn\u2019t get out of my head\u2014he\u2019s really got sportsmen\u2019s hands. He is not a dandy. Calloused, rough hands. He has a real love of salmon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shugrue wrote about his encounters with royalty and other big fish in a memoir. It\u2019s twelve chapters, structured by month: St. Barts in January, European sailing regattas in September, bird shooting in November. July is for salmon, his favorite. There are some sociological observations. \u201cThe vast amount of douchebags that you see along the journey,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cYou know, guys who speak with lockjaw and make you feel like an asshole.\u201d He provides advice on avoiding douchbaggery. \u201cA little PJ (Private Jet) etiquette,\u201d he writes. \u201cBring a few great snacks (caviar, Champagne, pre-poured bloodies, etc.) and a nice gift like an Herm\u00e8s cashmere blanket for when it gets chilly on board.\u201d The book was a COVID project, unpublished. \u201cMy wife said, \u2018Darling, I love you, and I think you are a decent writer, but I really don\u2019t want to read seventeen pages about salmon.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n
The salmon is a pretty great fish. It lives in saltwater and in fresh. It jumps twelve-foot dams. It travels thousands of miles across the ocean to find its ancestral river and spawns within feet of where it hatched. \u201cSadly, everybody wants to kill the salmon,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cIt has too many enemies.\u201d Poachers, farmed-fish effluent (\u201cYou\u2019re, like, \u2018How do fish shit this much?\u2019\u00a0\u201d), global warming, the demand of the seafood-eating public. \u201cAnd then, of course, sharks and other things want to eat them, too,\u201d Shugrue said. Who will be the salmon\u2019s friend? \u201cFor right or wrong, wild-salmon fishing is seen as a pretty one-per-cent, \u00e9litist kind of thing,\u201d Shugrue said. \u201cIt\u2019s, like, \u2018I\u2019m saving all these wild salmon so rich guys can catch them?\u2019\u00a0\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock submerged in Norway\u2019s Alta River and have gills, you probably missed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[7709,7730,7731,1760,120103,18753,7710,519,11993],"class_list":{"0":"post-335509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-british-royal-family","9":"tag-charles","10":"tag-charles-iii","11":"tag-king-charles","12":"tag-leisure-dept","13":"tag-magazine","14":"tag-royal-families","15":"tag-royal-family","16":"tag-splitscreenimageleftinset"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115009727654102559","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}