We finally got around to slicing up the more reliable structures for aging. I got a surprise. On the scales, we got the first 9 annuli right, but it turns out there are a lot of annuli that are mushed together so much at the edge of the scale that we could not pick them out from looking at the scale. Vertebral centra were the best aging structure for this fish. SO - final age - between 17 and 19 years old. This fish grew really well during the very high water years of the 1990s, then slowed down after that. If the fish was 18 years old, the 1993 flood year was a HUGE growth year - and for that reason I suspect that 18 is the real best guess.