Texas rainbow trout records broken, rebroken
No one really thought the kid-friendly Trout Days event at Chalk Bluff Park in Uvalde would be one — much less three — for the books. Organizers were only hoping the bitterly cold weather forecast for the weekend wouldn’t keep everyone away. On Friday, Jan. 8, Walter Ross of San Antonio caught a 6-pound, 10-ounce rainbow trout in the Nueces River at the park, a new state record for a fly rod. That night, other members of the Alamo Fly Fishers club gathered what bits and pieces of fly-tying materials they could find and sat down at their vises to tie replicas of Ross’ wooly bugger.
Saturday, the temperature dropped to 15 degrees, and club members contended with iced rod guides and frozen waders as they helped tournament anglers — mostly local children with their parents — with the fundamentals of the long rod.
On Sunday, Rob Burlingame landed a 7-pound, 13-ounce trout, displacing the as-yet-uncertified, one-day-old state record.
“After seeing Walter’s fish on Friday, which was almost 7 pounds, we were all shocked,” Burlingame said. “We knew it was a big fish, but we didn’t know what the record was for the state until we got back to the cabin and punched it up on a guy’s iPhone.”
In addition to helping with the tournament and promotional event, hosted by the Texas Hill Country Rivers Region, the San Antonio anglers were hoping to fill the larder for the club’s January dinner.
“When we went to the dinner we told everyone there we had two state records that would be served that night,” Burlingame said. “You can’t say that very often.”
The big trout, he added, tasted pretty good.
The end of Trout Days didn’t bring an end to record entries. The next Wednesday, Jan. 13, Timothy “T.J.” Boehm of Canyon Lake drove to Uvalde with friends and, on his second cast, hooked into a big fish.
“I was using my son’s $8 rod and spinning reel, with a Berkely PowerBait speckled salmon egg, because it was already rigged-up,” Boehm said. “I thought it was a carp that hit it. Then I saw it roll, and I was like, ‘Oh Lord, that’s a rainbow!’”
Boehm stayed to get a limit of five fish, but had the big one weighed on the return to his home on the Guadalupe River. The 26.5-inch trout, full of roe, weighed 8.92 pounds and is now the new rod-and-reel and all-tackle state record.
“It was a great experience,” he said. “I’ve lived overseas and done a lot of fishing, for everything from sailfish to grouper to barracuda, but this was just a real special experience for Texas.”
And the fish? The fish, Boehm said, “ate real nice.”
The spate of records from the Nueces River in Uvalde County may not be over. When the Hill Country Rivers Region ordered their trout, they asked for 100 pounds of “lunkers.” Apparently it did not occur to organizers — or to the fish stockers — that they were putting potential state records in the river.
But John Johnson, a pond consultant and stocker at Arms Bait Company and Fish Farm in Proctor wasn’t too surprised.
“We didn’t know anything about the size of the record,” Johnson said. “We don’t weigh individual fish, we just put them in a bucket and weigh a tub of them.”
Johnson said organizers of the Uvalde event requested 100 pounds of lunkers, and 400 pounds of half-pound fish. The lunkers, he said, could range from 6 to 9 pounds, “sometimes even a little bigger.”
“They come in from Missouri at a pretty good size,” he said. “We don’t stock them with the intention of setting records, we stock them with intention of the customers having a good winter of fishing.”
Anglers who don’t manage to hang a lunker trout at the Nueces this year might come back around in 2011 for even more opportunity. The Texas Hill Country Rivers Region reports that it will be stocking fish in the Frio River as well.
