This actually happened in early April. I learned about it only today (June!) in West Virginia Magazine. The following is an earlier April 13 article by Bob McNally I found in Outdoor Life Magazine online.
‘Too Fat to Jump.’ West Virginia Teen’s Massive Golden Rainbow Trout Is a Pending State Record
Every spring, West Virginia anglers head out on their own “Gold Rush.” The special two-week event revolves around golden rainbow trout, a unique strain of gold-colored rainbows that are produced in state hatcheries. This year, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources stocked 50,000 of these trout in 69 lakes and streams. One hundred trout were tagged and worth special prizes.
Fifteen-year-old Hunter Rohr was one of the anglers looking for gold this month. On April 2, during his spring break, he and his high high-school buddy Bryar Sandy were searching for fish in streams near Rohr’s home in Buckhannon.
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Rohr and Sandy had started fishing at 7 a.m. that morning. They’d each caught a few smaller golden rainbows and released them all as they usually do. Around noon, they found a pile of fish in a deep hole on the South Branch of the Potomac River.
“We call it the South Branch of the Smoke Hole, and we fish it a good bit,” Rohr tells Outdoor Life. “That day we were using light spinning tackle, four-pound test line and floats to try and catch a golden. We wanted one with a tag.”
The water was deep but clear, and there were some other anglers working the same stretch of water. Using a pair of quality polarized sunglasses, he spotted an especially large fish holding near a log on the bottom.
Click <more> below for more photos.
