As heard (or seen!) on the latest episode of Outdoor Journal Radio, Canada’s claim to the world record Lake Trout might be in jeopardy.
On May 5th, avid Colorado outdoorsman, Scott Enloe, and his son, Hunter, were on a local lake when they ran into two fish they won’t soon forget.
The first, for most people, would have been enough to make this a trip of a lifetime, with Hunter catching a massive 31-pound fish early in the morning. Little did they know that a fish later that day would blow this trophy out of the water.
Enloe told the Free Range American that he was using a heavy rod and a baitcaster spooled with 10-pound fluorocarbon line when a fish ate his six-inch tube jig. After a nearly 15-minute-long battle, the two anglers saw what they could be heard saying in the video was a “50-pounder”.
As it turned out, that “50-pounder” weighed in at a whopping 73.29 pounds, 20 pounds heavier than the current state record, and more than a pound heavier than the IGFA all-tackle world record.
However, the record was not as important to these two anglers as getting this fish back in the water. As heard on Episode 48 of Outdoor Journal Radio, many record books still require a fish to be killed and turned in to count as an official record.
“I never even considered killing the fish,” said Enloe. “This is [one of] the largest lake trout that’s ever been caught. Period. And I could have made it easy to put in the [IGFA] book, but I would have had to kill it. And I was not going to kill that fish.”
Since the fish swam away, the two will have to go through a few more steps before officially beating the Lake Trout weight record set by a 72-pound fish caught in Canada’s Northwest Territories in 1995. Thankfully, the fish will hit the books in the length category as the IGFA’s All Tackle World Record at an astounding 47 inches, 4.5 inches longer than the current record.
