Robbie Dockter was fishing the Marias River in Montana last Wednesday when he thought his lure snagged something. When it started moving upriver, he knew he had hooked into something big.
“I was thinking I’d finally gotten a brown over 10 pounds, but then she rolled in my headlamp and we realized this thing is next-level big,” Dockter told the Independent Record.
Dockter, fishing with his daughter at the end of daylight, landed what turned out to be a Montana record for brown trout, weighing 32.43 pounds, measuring 37 inches in length with a 28.5-inch girth and breaking the 55-year-old state record.
The old record was 29 pounds caught by E.H. Peck Bacon in Wade Lake in 1966.
Dockter, who was fishing a stretch of river known for its big trout, hooked the fish with a Kastmaster on an ultralight fishing rod and 4-pound test. When it started upstream, the brown trout “did whatever it wanted” as if it hadn’t even been hooked, Dockter told the Record.
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He battled the fish for 15 minutes before managing to steer it downriver where he finally beached the fish. His daughter Sierra handed him the net and he scooped it up.
Dockter recalled a 25-pound chinook salmon he had caught in Tiber Reservoir and told Sierra he thought this fish might be bigger.
Back at the truck, the fish weighed 32 pounds on their scale. Sierra, meanwhile, went online and discovered the state record was 29 pounds.
“I called my wife and told her I think I just caught the state record and she didn’t believe me,” Dockter told the Record.
The next day, they met with a game warden, who authenticated the catch as they watched the brown trout weighed on a certified scale at Christiaens Meat & Grocery in Valier.
“It’s a really humbling experience and I think it proves that monsters do exist, and it’s proof that you just never know and it just takes that one cast,” Dockter told the Record. “That’s what makes fishing so cool.”
Photos courtesy of Robbie Dockter.
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