Steve Jones, 72, regularly fishes Shaver Lake northeast of Fresno in Central California. He started fishing the lake as a youngster with his father, and he knows it well after all these years.
On Friday he was trolling on the lake alone in his 21-foot fiberglass boat. Using a pair of downriggers, he was pulling lures and targeting kokanee in roughly 90 feet of water. He’d already caught four of his five-fish kokanee limit when one of his light-action rods bent double. The 6-pound test monofilament line started peeling off the reel as the light drag screamed.
“I first thought I was snagged to a log,” Jones tells Outdoor Life. “I grabbed the rod and started playing whatever it was slowly toward the boat. I didn’t know what it was. But when it saw my boat, it went crazy at the surface and took off again on a long run.”
Jones figured he’d hooked a big rainbow trout in the 10-pound class, so he continued playing the fish slowly. He’d bring it near the boat, and it would take off again and again.
“That fish didn’t like my boat, and every time it saw my boat it powered away on another run,” says Jones, who lives in Clovis.
Jones fought the fish for about 30 minutes before he pulled it close enough to see it was a giant brown trout, and not a rainbow.
“I didn’t have a net big enough for it, so I tried grabbing it with one hand, my other hand holding my fishing rod. But the fish flopped, and its teeth got me in the hand, and I dropped it. I thought I was gonna lose the fish for sure – it felt like that throughout most of that fight.”
Jones worked the big brown back to his boat, set his fishing rod down, and used both hands to haul it aboard. He’s caught some big trout from Shaver, he says, but nothing like the brown he was now looking at. After putting the trout in his cooler, he went to reel in his other trolling rod that he’d left out.
“There was another kokanee on that rod the whole time I was playing my brown trout,” says Jones. “That was great, because it filled my daily limit.”
With his kokanee limit filled and the brown on ice, Jones took the trout to nearby Shaver Lake Sports to have it weighed.
“I weighed Steve’s 37.5-inch brown trout on two different certified scales, and it weighed 24.48 pounds,” Jarrett Watson of Shaver Sports tells OL.
With that weight, Jones’ fish easily tops Shaver’s unofficial lake record: an 18-pound brown trout caught there in the 1980s. (California doesn’t maintain official lake records.) The state record brown, by comparison, weighed 26 pounds 8 ounces, and it was caught in 1987 from upper Twin Lakes.
The IGFA all-tackle world record brown is a massive 44-plus-pound trout from New Zealand. However, the IGFA 6-pound line class record for the species is considerably smaller at 28.5 pounds. (That fish was caught from New York’s Niagara River in 1996.) This puts Jones’ 24.5-pound California brown near the top of the IGFA’s coveted 6-pound test category.
Read Next: This Pending World-Record Gar Is the Heaviest Freshwater Fish Ever Caught on 2-Pound Test
“To me this brown trout is a fish of a lifetime,” Jones says, “and I’ll have a taxidermist [mount] it so I can enjoy seeing it for many years.”
Read the full article here
