A Georgia angler on a fly-fishing trip to Idaho has landed a brown trout so rare that state biologists say only a handful like it have ever been documented — and she let it swim away.
Caroline Langdale caught the 30.5-inch brown while fishing the South Fork of the Snake River on 30 May, guided by Ed Emory of the South Fork Lodge. Idaho Fish and Game confirmed the catch as the state's new catch-and-release record this month, edging out the previous mark of 30 inches set by Chase Nelson on the Snake River back in October 2016.
The fish took a rubber-legs nymph, and the fight that followed lasted about ten minutes. Langdale, an experienced angler, sensed early it was something special — but it was Emory who called it. "No Caroline, this is a huge fish," the guide told her as it came into view.
"We were both in such shock that neither of us said anything for awhile," Langdale recalled. When she finally got her hands on it, the scale of the trout sank in. "It was as big around as my thigh," she said. "She was big enough to swallow both of my hands."
The day had started well before the record even showed up. "My trip was already made in the first 5 minutes when Ed rowed us back upstream from the put-in to a special hole where I caught a 21-inch hybrid rainbow," Langdale said. That she followed it with a fish of a lifetime left the lodge buzzing. "Everyone there was just genuinely so excited for me," she said.
Just how unusual the trout is comes through in Idaho Fish and Game's own survey data. The agency has captured more than 57,600 brown trout on the South Fork since monitoring began in 1986. "In all those years, surveys have documented only four brown trout over 30 inches," the agency said. "In other words, of all the brown trout captured during surveys, only 0.007% ever exceed 30 inches — that we know of."
The record sits in Idaho's catch-and-release category, a separate ledger from the traditional certified-weight records that require a fish to be killed and weighed on certified scales. For a trout this scarce, releasing it is the point — the fish is back in the South Fork, where it can spawn again and, for the next angler lucky enough to find it, grow larger still.
