While casting toward a group of small, surfacing kokanee, Oregon fisherman Ryan Mejaski hooked into something so big that his reel began screaming, forcing he and his fishing partner to give chase in their boat lest the huge fish take all the line off his reel.
Clearly, this wasn’t a kokanee.
Mejaski and Joe Wilhite were fishing on the Deschutes arm of Lake Billy Chinook on April 8 when the memorable battle with a massive bull trout unfolded.
Mejaski’s medium-lightweight rod was bent in half and nearly snapped, he told the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He spent at least 10 minutes fighting the fish before getting it to the boat where it was netted.
The anglers measured and weighed the bull trout. It was 33.5 inches long with a 26-inch girth, and it maxed out Wilhite’s net scale that goes to 25 pounds.
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Mejaski told ODFW that the fish was probably bigger, perhaps as much as 30 pounds. After taking some photos, they quickly released the fish and watched it swim away. Then, they began talking about how that fish could have been a state record, or even be close to a world record.
“I’m a little bummed out we didn’t keep it so we could get the official record, but it was the right thing to do at the time,” Mejaski told ODFW. “We really didn’t think about keeping it, we were so excited.”
The current Oregon record for a bull trout is 23 pounds, 2 ounces, caught in 1989 from Lake Billy Chinook. The world record is 32 pounds caught in 1949 from Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho.
“Every fisherman that we saw and showed photos of the fish said that they have never seen a bull trout that big,” Mejaski told ODFW. “People were happy about us letting it go, but it would be really cool to have a record fish.”
Deschutes District Fish Biologist Jerry George told Mejaski the fish might have been a state record and could have been 15 years old. He told ODFW “the fact that Ryan released the fish to spawn again, to be caught again is awesome.”
Still, Mejaski said he wishes he had kept the fish. He said he’ll probably pay to get a replica mount of the fish.
“But looking at it on my wall every day might be too painful,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.