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GS,
I agree with the film removal thing. The less time out of the water the better. The only thing about a scale, you gotta watch out for gill damage.
It doesn't even matter how big the fish are anymore to me anyways. I just like to get out, throw some bait or some lures, joke with the buddies, be thankful I'm alive. I usually try a conservative estimate of the size of the fish for bragging purposes but other than that, not a care.
There is another method to all of this madness. See if you can get someone to snap a photo. Then. using the photo, look at something in the shot the same distance from the camera, such as your hand. Measure your hand in real life, measure your same hand in the picture. Using that, you can find out the scale of the photo. Then you can find out the length of the fish and closely estimate the girth. Simply use the formula stated above.
This method was used to determine that an IGFA record small mouth was a fraud. As it turns out, the angler caught a bragging right sized small mouth out of the Dale Hollow Resovoir(I think) but to make it a world record, he stuffed lead weights and other heavy objects down the smallmouth's mouth. The scientists that review the claims of world record fish used the method I described in conjunction with the equation posted above. If the fish was actually the weight given, the man would have had 8 inch wide palms. The average man's palm is about 3.75 to 4 inches.
I actually learned this stuff in school. Geometry and when I worked in the school's print shop. It pays to pay attention.
You know what they say about wide palms don't you? ;D
Oh yes, I forgot to give an example of what I mean.
Allright suppose in the picture my hand was .5 inches wide. in real life say my hands are 4 inches wide.
Take .5 and put it over 4 so it's .5/4. Now say the fish was 15 inches in the photo.
so it's .5/4 = 7/X Then cross multiply. .5X=28. Divide .5 from each side. X=56 I think. So the fish would be 56 inches. Of course these are all made up numbers. I have no clue how big my hands are or how big they would be in a photo. It's just an example for people who forgot or didn't learn how to do proportions.
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