Montana’s Clark Fork River solely flows by way of Idaho briefly earlier than it spills into Lake Pend Oreille. That brief stretch of river beckoned Daniel Whitesitt and his buddy Caleb Bravard on April 13, and the 2 fly fishermen hiked right into a distant spot in Bonner County. Later that morning, Whitesitt caught and launched a gorgeous cutthroat trout that was licensed as a new state record on Wednesday.
“We’d solely caught one trout that morning, so it was fairly sluggish,” Whitesitt tells Outside Life. “However about 9 a.m. I waded out to the pinnacle of a pool just under a riffle and made an extended forged. I used to be [fishing] a big, grey stonefly nymph under an indicator.”
Whitesitt’s indicator dipped virtually instantly, and when he set, he felt lifeless weight on the tip of his line. For a second he thought it was a snag — till the snag took off working. Whitesitt knew it was a superb fish, however he figured it was a rainbow when he noticed the trout leap.
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“There are some large rainbows in that space,” says Whitesitt, a dentist in Put up Falls. “I fought the fish deep for a pair minutes, and it simply bulldogged down.”
Whitesitt lastly labored the trout close to shore and yelled for Bravard to assist land it. Bravard dashed over, grabbed the online, and scooped up his buddy’s fish. The very first thing they seen was the crimson slash beneath its jaw, which informed them it was a cutty and never a rainbow.
“I used to be surprised that it was a cutthroat due to its dimension,” Whitesitt says. “I believed it is perhaps a state size report, which I believed was 24 inches lengthy. Once we fastidiously measured it and photographed the fish, positive sufficient, it was 25 inches.”
As a result of the anglers had been out of mobile phone vary, they couldn’t examine the Idaho Division of Fish and Sport’s record book to see if it was certainly a catch-and launch report. (The company maintains an inventory of each licensed weight information and catch-and-release information, that are measured in inches and never kilos.) They took some images in any case after which launched the trout again into the river.
Again on the town that afternoon, Whitesitt double-checked the IDFG report e-book and noticed that the present catch-and-release report for Westlope cutthroat trout was a 24-incher caught from Priest Lake in 2021. So, he stuffed out a report software kind and despatched it to the IDFG workplace together with images. He waited earlier than getting too excited, questioning if the fish was really a rainbow-cutthroat hybrid (often known as a “cutbow”) due to it’s dimension. However fisheries biologists confirmed that it was a Westslope cutthroat — one in every of three cutthroat subspecies native to Idaho.
“It was so large, I’d guess six or seven kilos, and cutthroats hardly ever develop longer than 20 inches. However the state of us appeared on the images fastidiously and verified that it’s a pure cutthroat and a brand new report,” Whitesitt says. “I’m prone to have a reproduction mount product of that fish as a result of it was so lovely. Its reminiscence won’t ever fade.”