Dylan Smith, a fisherman from Idaho Falls, has reclaimed his spot in the Idaho record book with another 40-plus-inch lake trout. The monster laker came from Payette Lake, which is the same water body where he broke the state’s catch-and-release laker record in 2018. It’s also where Smith’s record was replaced by an angler from Utah, Aaron Goettsche, in 2025.
Smith was fishing on Payette on May 2 when he caught the trout, according to an announcement from the Idaho Fish and Game Department on Tuesday. Smith released the fish, so it was never weighed. But he measured the laker at 43.25 inches long, which beat out Goettsche’s standing catch-and-release record by just 1.25 inches.
“The former lake trout record holder has returned!” Smith wrote in a Facebook post on June 9, when IDFG made the record official. “43.25” is the new length to beat!”
Smith’s post also included a release video that shows the monster laker swimming off strong. The fish clearly has a PIT tag, which means it was likely caught and released at some point by a state fisheries biologist.
This tagging is part of IDFG’s management program on Payette, which revolves around the trophy-sized lake trout that live in the large water body near McCall. The agency says Payette “arguably one of the premier lake trout fisheries in the state of Idaho,” and over the last 10 or so years, they’ve worked to maintain that reputation.
In the early 2000s, biologists noticed the lake trout there getting thinner and thinner. They chalked this up to a drop in the lake’s kokanee population, coupled with an increase in smaller-sized lakers.
So, in 2018, IDFG started a restoration project on Payette that involved stocking more kokanee and taking smaller lake trout (under 27 inches) out of the population. IDFG says more than 3,000 of those smaller lakers have been removed since then, which has allowed the remaining fish to grow faster and fatter.
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The back-to-back laker records set over the last 12 months are a testament to this management strategy. Although Smith’s 43.25-inch fish was never put on a scale, it likely weighed somewhere between 30 and 35 pounds, according to a rough length-to-weight conversion chart. But IDFG believes there are even bigger lakers swimming in Payette. In 2023, biologists there caught and released a lake trout that weighed 54 pounds.