I knew Victorian (location not monarch) Patty Hallberg, and the fact that you may not have known her is much to your misfortune. She was a character in the sense that Zorba the Greek was a character, but without the ouzo. She lived on a quiet street back from the waterfront in Victoria with a daughter and husband Lee, a radio personality.

I got to know her when I was taking out her daughter (actually granddaughter, but that's another story) and I would go park myself in her kitchen for tea while waiting for young Barb to finish Saturday morning work. It was on one of those Saturday mornings that I noticed her watching the cat devouring a bowl of salmon. I commented that she treated her cat to some pretty choice food and she agreed but said offhandedly that "We'll see if it kills her".

In answer to my incredulity she explained that the salmon was from a tin she had found at the back of a cupboard and she wasn't sure it was still safe to eat. She had had it canned from a fish that she or her husband Lee had caught some years before and as there was no date on the tin she felt it best to try some of it on the cat before serving it to the family. That led to a conversation about salmon fishing, a topic always dear to my heart and the revelation that she held a world record for line-caught coho salmon. I had to hear the story.

I mentioned that Lee was a radio personality. He was known to CKDA listeners in Victoria as "the old fisherman" and he gave a weekly report on fishing news of the lower island – who had caught what and where and with what lure. It was the news all sports fishermen wanted to know before heading out to the tide lines off lower Vancouver Island from Cowichan Bay to Sooke on their weekend trips.

The 1970s were still a time when if you had company coming for dinner, you could take yourself off to local waters, rent a boat if need be and come back with a salmon. You could catch a fish with some certainty by one of three methods: trolling, mooching or bucktailing. It was the latter method that garnered the trophy fish but the details surrounding its taking were pretty bizarre.

A bucktail is a large hook covered with buck tail, that is deer hair which has been dyed in various colours. You don't need a flasher with it and no, I'm not going to go into a lengthy description of various sports fishing components, because as I said you don't need one. The absence of that flasher makes for a great fight when a coho strikes. The bucktail is trolled at a fairly good clip so that it bounces (gently) along the surface and a coho salmon will strike at it just as if it were an anchovy or a herring. And then the fun begins. Coho strike hard, fight hard and tire quickly. They also taste delicious and are a favourite with every weekend angler. Lee often went out with his buddies to do some bucktailing off Cowichan Bay. Patty was never invited.

She invited herself.

One Saturday morning, she was up, got Lee his tea, filled a large thermos and when he had gathered his gear, she was waiting on the front porch, new rod in hand, all set to go fishing. He was not too pleased, but allowed as how if she kept quiet she might be useful, and off they went. She had her own thermos and enjoyed a few cups while on the road out of the city.

The gang of fisher friends were going to be bucktailing around Cowichan Bay that morning and Patty got a seat amidships (that's halfway in a ten-foot tin boat) and sat there cradling her rod in her arms. She had to cradle it to control the rod because even at a modest speed there was a strong drag on the line and there were no rod holders on Lee's boat.

There was also no toilet, and that would be an even greater problem. Those cups of tea were only "on loan" as they say, and at one point she mentioned that they should head back to the marina so she could use the facilities. Lee said they weren't going back in until they had fish and she could do what anyone else did - use the pee bucket.

Understand, he was not an unkind person, but one just can't be burning up fuel and fishing time going back and forth from tideline to toilet all morning. I understood he had expressed himself somewhat more tersely before tossing her the ice cream bucket from the back of the boat, the one she had assumed was simply a bailing bucket. He also was not particularly unkind in telling her to hang onto her rod while using the bucket because "Damn it all, woman; I wanna keep fishing".

You really had to be there to fully appreciate the story as Patty recounted it with all her dramatic flourishes. Picture her positioning herself just so over a plastic gallon ice cream bucket, knickers past her knees in a small boat clipping along over the waves. I was sitting in her comfortable kitchen and I could appreciate the drama as she relived a very awkward experience. Then a fish hit the lure.

Now she had a bucket beneath her and a thrashing coho on the end of her line and both demanded a lot of attention. In response to her request that Lee take her rod, he gave some very unkind advice about playing her own fish because he had his own rod to look after and some other probably quite misogynistic comments that she never bothered to enumerate. She hung on, somehow got herself into a more stable posture without kicking the bucket as it were, and began playing the fish. There was no lack of advice in that matter either, of course. And wonder of wonders, she got the fish in close enough to be netted, something Lee was quite agreeable to doing. It was a big fish.

At first it might have seemed that it was a spring salmon, but no, coho have very distinctive markings, white gums being the most prominent. Another fisher headed over - one Lars Jensen I think, a member of the Jensen fishing lure company - and he was of the opinion that they should head in and get it weighed because it looked to be a record size.

Lee was fine with taking that advice especially as it came from someone with credentials in the sport and he powered up the outboard and headed for the marina. The coho weighed in at 35 pounds which was a world record at the time and remained so for many years. It made for a lot of meals.

I believe her cat was eating one at the time.