Something Fishy About Making This a Record

Bernard Lopez of Paramount on Tuesday cast some Crave Bait into Chris’ Pond at Santa Ana River Lakes and walked away with a monstrous trout that could land him in the state’s freshwater fishing record book.

Lopez pulled from the small Anaheim fishery a rainbow weighing 24.09 pounds, a catch that is being submitted to the Department of Fish and Game for state record consideration. The current record is a 23-pound rainbow caught in January 2000 at Lake Natoma in Northern California.

A remarkable catch? That’s open to debate.

The fish Lopez caught was grown at a private hatchery in Northern California to record size before it was stocked. It was among two or three such fish planted in the last week in hopes that one would be caught during a big-fish promotion.

One was, and as a result the concessionaires at Santa Ana River Lakes have landed a valuable marketing tool. Or they will have, if and when the record is approved by the Department of Fish and Game.

Should such a catch qualify for a record?

Lopez is beaming beneath the spotlight, saying that an angler has to catch a record-sized fish, regardless of when it was stocked, and pointing out that his whopper took 30 minutes to subdue.

A point well made.

Still, what we also have is a fish that might not even have had a day to get used to its surroundings, to become the slightest bit wary. The glob of Crave was probably the first thing it had eaten in its new home.

What Lopez’s catch illustrates is that hatcheries are pumping out bigger trout every year. And that, in California anyway, they can produce record-sized trout for whoever is willing to pay the price.