West coast trophy trout hunters are a rugged breed of men, forgoing the comforts of home for bitter cold, wind and waves on high altitude lakes. They are men obsessed, filling their time between fishing trips by hand-painting lures for added realism, fiddling with their rods and reels, and watching fishing on television or reading about it on the Internet. Well, most of them anyway. One big-trout specialist I've had the pleasure to meet just caught the largest California lake trout of the year so far, and when not out on the water, this angler watches Hannah Montana.

Meet Katie Stout. Katie is a third-grader from Sparks, Nevada who like a lot of young girls enjoys riding in her daddy's boat. Nothing unusual there, until you find out that while on that boat she's reeled in more giant mackinaw than half the charter captains on Lake Tahoe. It doesn't hurt that her father Brad is a serious angler who has caught numerous brown and cutthroat trout over ten pounds and mackinaw over twenty. Brad tells me that Katie has been fishing ‘since she could walk', and caught her first fifteen-pound mackinaw when she was five. A lot of Katie's big fish have been caught vertical jigging with heavy spoons, and dad Brad will usually work his magic with his fish finder and rod tip to locate large lakers and get them to bite, but then he'll hand the rod off to his daughter who hauls them up from the depths. Brad has developed a system that facilitates this process, including using twenty-pound test line, a heavy drag setting on the reel, and a saltwater-style fighting belt for his daughter to secure the butt of the rod and gain leverage. As an added safety measure when Katie was younger Brad attached the rod and reel to a cleat on the boat with a rope. He tells me she's now big enough that he's not worried about a fish ripping the rod from her hands or pulling her overboard. He still keeps his hand hovering near the strap on the back of her life vest though, just in case.

On April 3, father and daughter spent the morning on Donner Lake, where Brad hoped to put Katie on to her first mackinaw over twenty pounds. She had come close several times before, reeling in big macks up to nineteen pounds in weight, and Brad knew there were larger fish lurking in the lake's clear, cold waters; his best fish to date from Donner was a 28 pounder.

They fished for several hours without a bite, which is not uncommon when hunting for a trophy, and Brad wisely prepares for these slow times by keeping his boat stocked with snacks, drinks, portable video games and even a DVD player when taking kids fishing. The day was breezy, which made jigging for fish difficult, so they were trolling one of Brad's homemade lures designed to look and swim like a nine-inch rainbow trout. They were just finishing their last run, nearing the boat ramp when the rod with the counterfeit rainbow popped free of the downrigger set 65 feet deep.

"Go get it Katie!" Brad yelled, and she did, like a pro, struggling to remove the deeply bent rod from its holder. They could tell this was a big one, but were not sure if it would break the twenty pound mark as it stayed deep and surged powerfully for several minutes.

"I actually had to turn the drag down a bit for this one," Brad told me "I was watching the rod and it looked like it was going to snap." When Katie finally pulled the fish up to the surface, Brad was speechless. He scooped it up with his long-handled salmon net and after a bit of whooping and hollering (On Brad's part; from his daughter it was a round of squeals and giggles), he quickly weighed it on his thirty-pound capacity scale, only to find that the fish pulled it down to the thirty-pound mark and slightly beyond. He tried a second scale of the same capacity, with the same result. By now there was more hollering, from people at the boat ramp who had watched Katie fighting her leviathan.

Brad slammed the boat into gear and in seconds had pulled up to the dock, where he handed a stranger his camera and had him take photographs of the proud papa, tiny trophy hunter, and a lake trout around four feet long, with a head larger than either of theirs. After a quick father-daughter conference, Brad further amazed the onlookers when he lowered the fish of a lifetime back into the water. With a practiced hand he moved it gently back and forth by the wrist of its tail, flaring its gills with each backward pull, until it regained strength, slipped free of his grip and shot powerfully into the depths.

The lake record for Donner mackinaw is 34 pounds, and the California state record, a 37 pounder from Tahoe, has stood for over 35 years. Brad estimates his daughter's fish at a little over 31 pounds so we're not in danger of having Katie break either record, yet. Her dad is a member of IGFA, the International Game Fish Association, which keeps tally of world record fish. He has submitted Katie's fish as a catch-and-release entry in the youth division (under age eleven), and if accepted she will be recognized as the youth world-record holder for lake trout, beating the old record by ten pounds.

So remember, all you manly trophy trout anglers, however good you are, and however big your fish, somebody somewhere is catching bigger fish than you, and it just might be a nine-year-old girl.

Until Next Time!
Mark (Never Stand In A Canoe) Wiza
Pro-Staff for AC Plugs and Pro-Cure Bait Scents
Pro Guide for Sep's Pro Fishing
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Mark is a licensed fishing guide offering a small number of fun and highly educational trout-fishing trips in the Tahoe area. Call (530) 545-1475 or e-mail Mark wiza@fishsniffer.com for details.