The 86-kg fish that was netted in Lohit

Itanagar, March 13: Any angler worth his hook, line and sinker has a story to tell about “the one that got away”.

Last Sunday, Ruzing Bellai not only found a story to tell but also an 86-kg catch to go with it, the kind of aquatic monster Ernest Hemingway’s Santiago dreamt of while scouring the ocean for his redeeming moment in The Old Man and the Sea.

Bellai, 30, and 19 more fishermen struggled for nearly four hours in a remote village of Lohit district in Arunachal Pradesh to tame the giant catfish, said to be a Gangetic goonch. When they finally hauled the fish ashore, the fishermen knew they had just landed the catch of a lifetime.

The scaleless, thick-skinned fish — known as mein lomen in the local dialect — is not a rarity in the Lohit and other rivers of Arunachal Pradesh, but never before had anyone caught one that big. “We were stunned and even more so by the craze it created when we took the fish to the market,” Bellai told The Telegraph from Chongkham village, nearly 500km from Itanagar.

Scientist P. Nath, who has been studying fishes of the Northeast for over two decades, confirmed it was the biggest catch ever in the region. He said fishes weighing between 60 and 65kg had been caught before in the Siang, Dikrong, Lohit and Noadehing rivers, but Bellai’s mein lomen was by far the largest.

Bellai and some youths who had gone to the river for fishing early on Sunday first noticed a “massive rock-like thing” that seemed to be moving in the water. When the youths hurled stones, it reacted with a splash of its big tail.

“The fish would have safely swum into the deeper part of the river had it not got trapped between two rocks. It was injured and that is why we were able to catch it,” Bellai said.

When the fish was taken to a market near Chongkham, it instantly attracted a long queue of buyers. “We pegged the price at Rs 10,000. After some bargaining, we sold it to man named Chow Namchoom for Rs 9,000,” Bellai said.

The head was so large that it had to be chopped with an axe. Part of the meat was cooked for a feast at Namchoom’s house that very night. The proud owner said he would preserve the rest as “dry meat”, to be savoured at a later date with perhaps a pint of the local brew.