Every year, three long-time fishing buddies meet up in either North Carolina or Tennessee to trout fish. On the afternoon of June 28, the trio launched their 14-foot johnboat with a jet outboard into the South Fork of the Holston River and ran upstream to the Boone Lake Dam Tailwater in northeast Tennessee.
“We wanted big trout, and we knew the shallow, rocky area below the dam was a prime spot for them when dam turbines are on, and they were,” angler Charles Fulton, 45, tells Outdoor Life. “It’s a tough place to fish because it’s shallow, and dangerous with boulders and swift current. You gotta have life preservers on most of the time.”
Fulton and his North Carolina pals, Robert Benfield and Meade Forbes, ran their boat up into the swift water below the dam and started casting jerk-bait plugs with spinning tackle. They held their boat in the swift current with the outboard motor and the trolling motor on the bow.
“We hooked a lot of big, strong fish but we had a hard time putting any in the boat,” says Fulton, a water manager for the city of Louisville, Mississippi. “Then I hooked a nice 5-pound brown trout and got it in the boat. Then one of my friends caught and boated a 7-pound rainbow trout.”
The men also saw a huge brown that followed a lure.
“That fish was over 15 pounds, and we knew we couldn’t handle it if it struck. But it dove and disappeared.”
Then, around 4:30 p.m., Fulton cast a 5-inch jerkbait into a section of swift water and something big struck it. He battled the fish on braided 20-pound test with a monofilament leader.
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“It was much stronger and fought harder than the brown trout I’d already caught,” he says. “It never jumped, though, and a couple minutes later I got it close to the boat, and Benfield scooped it up in the net. The trout was not happy about being caught. It tore the back hook out of my plug when we put it in the boat.”
Fulton thought his trout was a rainbow. But Benfield recognized the distinctive orange slashes on the underside of its lower jaw, and told Fulton it was a cutthroat.
“Robbie fishes that tailrace a lot, and he knew the state record was smaller,” Fulton says.
The anglers checked that record on their cell phones — a cutthroat that weighed 4 pounds 12 ounces and was also caught in the Boone tailwaters by 10-year-old Palmer Tipton in July 2023 — and started making phone calls. But it was after business hours by then, and the fishermen couldn’t connect with state officials on how to proceed with Fulton’s record size cutthroat trout. So they kept fishing until dark.
“When we got done fishing and hauled the boat out of the water, we knew we had to locate a certified scale to weigh my trout,” Fulton said. “We had trouble locating a place to weigh the fish until we got to the H&H Market in Elizabethton.”
There, on certified scales, the fish weighed 6 pounds 9 ounces — nearly two pounds heavier than the existing record. Fulton’s fish measured 22 inches long with a 14.75-inch girth.
The buddies put the fish on ice until it could be inspected by state officials. Only July 2, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency fisheries biologist Sally Petre positively identified the trout as a cutthroat and verified the catch as the new state record.
Cutthroat trout are not native to Tennessee. They are a Western state import that have been stocked in several Tennessee rivers. In 2021, 2,500 cutthroats were stocked in the Boone tailrace area, and some of those fish are resurfacing now.
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Cutthroats in the tailrace have done well, according to Petre and TWRA plans to stock more this year. Other locations around the state also may be stocked with the hard-fighting trout.
“Cutthroat trout are really beautiful, and photos of my fish just don’t do it justice,” says Fulton. “I’m going to have the trout mounted by a taxidermist. And you can bet we’ll be back after them again … Fishing is in my blood, it’s what I live for.”
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