A Wyoming man recently caught a giant tiger trout—and broke a state record in the process. According to a Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) press release, Shelby Holder of Kemmerer, Wyoming, went fishing on the Hams Fork River near his hometown on June 6.
Holder says he was targeting rainbow trout in one of his go-to fishing holes with a 1-weight fly rod—which is the lightest weight fly rod typically used for catching small trout. Holder had an 8-pound test leader on. He was stripping a brown woolly bugger through the hole when a big tiger trout scared the rainbows away.
“I thought I would cast at him. He rolled on the fly, I set the hook, and that fly rod was bent in a ‘U,’” Holder said. “I knew I had to take my time if I hoped to land it. I had all evening so that’s what I did. It was spectacular and awesome. I never thought I would hook into something that big.”
The fight took 30 minutes, but Holder eventually got the lunker to shore. The tiger trout was 31-inches long with a girth of 19 inches. It weighed in on an official scale at 14 pounds, 15 ounces—easily besting the previous Wyoming state record, a 12.77-pounder caught by Jaxon Krall last year.
Holder’s catch marks the third year that Wyoming’s tiger trout record has fallen. Tiger trout are a sterile hybrid between a female brown trout and a male brook trout. The species is popular among anglers, and the WGFD started stocking them in Viva Naughton Reservoir in 2014. Holder’s fish was caught below that reservoir, where some of the fish have spread.
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“The performance of tiger trout stocked in Viva Naughton has undoubtedly exceeded our expectations,” said Green River Fisheries Biologist Jessica Lockwood. “As we hoped, tiger trout keying into the abundant Utah chub population has produced some exceptional-sized fish.”
