Idaho’s deepest water body, Lake Pend Oreille, is full of mysteries and massive fish. The huge glacial lake, which also holds the title of the fifth deepest lake in America, covers nearly 150 square miles of the Idaho panhandle and reaches 1,158 feet at its lowest point. (That’s roughly equivalent to the Empire State Building.) The lake is so big and bottomless that the U.S. Navy tests submarines on Pend Oreille (pronounced Pond-uh-RAY). Rumor has it there’s still a sunken sub down there somewhere.
Kyle Hatrock, of nearby Coeur d’Alene, was plumbing those depths on Feb. 1, when he and his buddies caught and released an absolute giant of a cutthroat trout. The 27-inch Westslope cutty was just declared a new state record by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, beating out the previous catch-and-release record by two inches.
It also would have blown the state weight record out of the water, had they kept it. But state regs prohibit anglers from keeping cutthroats on Pend Oreille. Hatrock did not respond to a request for comment from Outdoor Life.
“We’d just got all the lines out when not 10 minutes later, one pole starts singing out the line,” Hatrock said, according to IDFG’s announcement. “The first run took out 450 feet-plus for about 15-20 minutes, and as soon as it hit the net, my friend started freaking out, saying ‘That’s the biggest freaking cutty I’ve ever seen!’”
As the agency also points out, Hatrock’s giant cutthroat “reinforces Lake Pend Oreille’s reputation as Idaho’s top trophy trout fishery.” Looking at Idaho’s record books, the lake has produced at least four record-sized trout over the years. The state-record bull trout, caught there in 1947, still holds the world record for the species at 32 pounds even.
One could also wager that the 25-inch Westslope cutthroat that Hatrock’s fish replaced in the record book was a Pend Oreille fish as well. The fly fisherman who caught that trout, Daniel Whitesitt, explained to Outdoor Life that he was fishing the lowest stretch of the Clark Fork River, which flows briefly through Idaho before dumping into Pend Oreille’s eastern end.
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Whitesitt caught his state-record cutty there in mid-April, around the same time cutthroats in the northern Rockies are spawning in tributary streams. And cutties rarely grow that large in rivers — the biggest ones are typically lake dwellers. So, in all likelihood, that fish had run up the Clark Fork from the depths of Lake Pend Oreille.