Montanan Reels In Record Trout

The rainbow trout that Jack Housel Jr. landed on “a really cheap lure” and 24-pound line apparently is a world record.

At the Libby post office Tuesday, it weighed 33.1 pounds and was 38.62 inches long, said Scott Snelson, biologist with the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

“We took it to the post office in Libby because that’s the only scale in town that was certified and large enough to handle this fish,” Snelson said of Monday’s catch.

The rainbow now in the record books weighed 31 pounds, 6 ounces and was taken from Lake Michigan in 1993. That fish dethroned a 29-pound, 2-ounce rainbow taken from the Kootenai River in 1991, probably within a quarter of a mile from where Housel scored, said Jay DeShazer, a technician in the Libby office.

Housel caught his whopper in the Kootenai River just below Libby Dam, 17 miles east of Libby, on a 1-ounce silver and orange Pot o’ Gold lure.

“It’s a real-cheap-to-buy lure, about $1.69,” he said. “You can buy’em anywhere.”

But he was also using a new type of line called spiderwire, far stronger and tougher than monofilament.

The wildlife department has sent a tissue sample to a genetics laboratory in Missoula to confirm that Housel’s fish is a rainbow.