A fisherman in New York had his hopes dashed earlier this month, when he learned that his certified state-record salmon wouldn’t qualify for the books, after all. This wasn’t his fault, according to New York Upstate, who first reported the story. He caught the fish legally and followed all the proper steps to certify it, and for a short period, he was even told he had the record in the bag. But as it turns out, he caught the rare salmon just one year too late for it to get the recognition it deserved.
“I went from the highest high to the lowest low in about five hours,” Cliff Chamberlan told the news outlet Tuesday, referring to the disappointing news he got from the state on Sept. 4.
Chamberlan, who’s been fishing the Great Lakes tributaries since the 1970s, explained that he’d caught the fish from the Salmon River on Aug. 31. He was fly fishing and drifting a plastic bead (an egg imitation) when he hooked the salmon. At first he thought it was a coho, which along with chinook and steelhead are stocked annually in the Lake Ontario tributary by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation.
It was a decent-sized fish, so Chamberlan put it on the stringer, but he said it didn’t look quite like the other cohos he’d caught from the Salmon. Its spots went all the way down to its tail, and it had the telltale hump of a pink salmon (also called a “humpy”), which are sometimes misidentified as cohos — especially before they take on their full spawning colors.
Chamberlan later took the fish to another angler he knew, who weighed it at 6.5 pounds. The angler said that, in his opinion, it looked like a bigger pink salmon. The fish was big enough, at least, to outweigh the standing New York record for pink salmon: a 4 pound 15 ounce fish that was caught from Lake Erie in 1985.
So, on Sept. 4, the fisherman brought his catch to an NYDEC fisheries biologist, who confirmed the species and certified the fish as a new state record. By that point the salmon, which had been in Chamberlan’s freezer, had shed a few ounces, and its official weight was 6 pounds, 1 ounce — still enough to supplant the 1985 record. There was just one problem, howver. As NYUP reports, the NYDEC had decided in 2024 to remove pink salmon from its list of species that are eligible for state records.
“They went through all the formalities of making sure it was a state record, told me congratulations,” Chamberlan told NYUP. “And then they called me back and said they retired the pink salmon category.”
Although the NYDEC did not comment on why Chamberlan had been told he had the record, the agency did provide the following statement on rescinded records to OL in an emailed statement:
Records are retired due to a variety of reasons. In the case of pink salmon, it was found during the most recent Angler Achievement Awards Program revamp that no catches were entered in the program since the 1985 state record was established. To maintain consistency, any fish species removed from the Angler Award Category would be removed for state record consideration, subsequently placing the current records in historical standing. It would be unfair to other anglers to add this to the record books if other post-retirement era fish were caught by other individuals. The Department of Environmental Conservation may consider adding pink salmon to the list of eligible species if catches increase in the future.
In recent years, the NYDEC has also retired striped bass, American eel, kokanee salmon, and a few other species that were previously eligible for records. The agency explains on its website that for a species like striped bass, which are on the decline in much of their range, it no longer made sense for it to accept new weight records. Stripers over 35 inches have to be released now, anyways, according to New York regs, and it would be against the law for an angler to bonk a big linesider for the scales.
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The history behind New York’s pink salmon fishery is a little more complicated, according to NYUP. Pinks are the least common of the three Pacific salmon species that can be found in New York waters because they aren’t actually part of the state’s stocking program, which churns out hundreds of thousands of cohos and more than a million chinook annually.
The only reason humpies are in the region is due to a Canadian fish hatchery that in 1956 reportedly dumped some pink salmon fingerlings into a sewer that drained into Lake Superior. Those fish survived, and by 1979, their pioneering offspring had reached Lake Ontario, where they’ve been spawning in tributaries like the Salmon River ever since.
The species remains a rarity in New York waters today. And because they still aren’t being stocked by the state, humpies will never be as abundant as their larger Pacific cousins, cohos and chinook. Which makes Chamberlan’s state-record-sized pink all the more impressive — regardless of what the record books might say.
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