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 tells Outdoor Life they were trolling streamers that day, using down riggers with planer boards. They’d only been on the water for 10 minutes when the trout ate a fly in about 20 to 30 feet of water.
“It took about 300 feet [of line] right off the first run, and I just picked up the rod and started working it back in,” Hatrock says. “I thought it was a lake trout [until] my buddy screamed, ‘That’s the biggest cutty I’ve ever seen!”
After netting the fish, they measured it at 27 inches. Then they released it back into the lake. Hatrock did some quick research after he got home and knew his fish was big enough to replace the standing record.
“Catching that big of a fish really didn’t sink in at first,” Hatrock says. “I never thought I’d be in the record books and, honestly, it’s all pretty humbling.”
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.
Kubie Brown contributed reporting to this story. It was updated on March 19 to include comments from Kyle Hatrock.