Montana’s Clark Fork River solely flows via 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 brand new state report 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 nearly instantly, and when he set, he felt useless 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 bounce.
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“There are some massive rainbows in that space,” says Whitesitt, a dentist in Submit 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 web, and scooped up his buddy’s fish. The very first thing they observed was the crimson slash below its jaw, which instructed them it was a cutty and never a rainbow.
“I used to be surprised that it was a cutthroat due to its measurement,” Whitesitt says. “I assumed it is likely to be a state size report, which I believed was 24 inches lengthy. Once we rigorously measured it and photographed the fish, certain sufficient, it was 25 inches.”
As a result of the anglers had been out of cellular phone vary, they couldn’t verify the Idaho Division of Fish and Recreation’s report e book to see if it was certainly a catch-and launch report. (The company maintains a listing of each licensed weight data and catch-and-release data, 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 crammed 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 measurement. However fisheries biologists confirmed that it was a Westslope cutthroat — certainly one of three cutthroat subspecies native to Idaho.
“It was so massive, I’d guess six or seven kilos, and cutthroats not often develop longer than 20 inches. However the state people appeared on the images rigorously and verified that it’s a pure cutthroat and a brand new report,” Whitesitt says. “I’m more likely to have a duplicate mount fabricated from that fish as a result of it was so lovely. Its reminiscence won’t ever fade.”
