Robert Riggs and his son Brent carried their small jon boat, trolling motor, and fishing gear to the edge of Mannington Lake in West Virginia the morning of March 28. They readied the boat for fishing, then pushed off onto the calm water.
The two anglers were after trout that day. Using light spinning gear and spoons, they soon caught a small brown and a rainbow.
“I had just switched to using a ¼-ounce yellow, green, and orange Dardevle spoon,” Robert, a retired paramedic from Grant Town, tells Outdoor Life. “Just before 11 a.m. I made a cast to a submerged tree branch I saw under clear lake water near the lake bank. Something hit it, I set the hook, and knew right away it was a big trout.”
Robert says the fish never jumped and went deep as it steadily pulled line off the reel. The fish tried to get under their boat several times during the battle, and Robert struggled to keep it from rubbing his line against the boat and breaking off.
“I’d just put new 6-pound test monofilament fishing line on my reel, and it was a brand I’d never used previously,” he said. “I was worried the line might not be up to the fight the fish was putting on — it lasted about five minutes. Finally, I got it near the surface at the boat, and Brent went to land it. But the fish was way too big for our small landing net that’s usually good for anything we catch.”
Brent somehow got the big trout’s nose into the small net. Then he leaned way out over the gunwales and scooped the fish by its belly and tail in one swift motion, rolling the big trout into their boat. Robert says there’s no way he could have landed the fish without Brent’s help.
“Brent was soaked from leaning out of the boat. But he got the fish in the boat. It was the biggest trout I’d ever seen.”
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The two quickly identified the fish as a tiger trout, a hybrid cross between a brown and a brook trout. While these crosses can occur in the wild, they are extremely rare, and most tigers are spawned in hatcheries and stocked for fishermen. Riggs, who regularly fishes Mannington, says the state regularly stocks the small, 10-acre lake with tigers, along with brown, rainbow, brook, and golden trout.
The father-son duo kept fishing for a short time after landing the big tiger trout, but with no luck. They then headed back to shore, loaded their boat and gear along with the heavy tiger trout, and went home.
“When we got home, my brother saw my fish and told me he thought it was a record tiger trout,” Robert said. “So, we drove to the state DNR office in nearby Farmington to have them look at the fish.”
WVDNR conservation officer Dustin Smith weighed and measured the fish at the office and confirmed it was a new state record weight tiger trout. Robert’s trout weighed 12.55 pounds and was just over 27 inches long. It tops the state record, a tiger weighing 11.98 pounds caught in 2024.
For comparison, the IGFA all-tackle tiger trout weighed 27 pounds, 6 ounces. Angler Cathy Clegg caught that fish from Loon Lake in Washington in 2022.
“I don’t know yet where we’ll hang the [replica] mount in our home,” he says. “It depends on what my wife Shelly decides. I think she wants it in my man cave.”
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