Idaho officials were proud to announce a new state-record lake trout Monday. The 42-inch lunker was caught by Aaron Goettsche, a fisherman and rod maker from Utah, and a lot of their excitement stems from the lake where the fish was caught. Officials are saying Goettsche’s fat, trophy-sized laker is a sign of a fishery reborn.
“Payette Lake is back — and better than ever,” Idaho Fish and Game officials said in a press release announcing the record.
Goettsche, who lives in Stansbury Park, caught and released the new state length record lake trout on June 19. (Idaho is one of several states that recognizes length records, which are typically for released fish and separate from certified weight records.) He’d been spending the week on Payette Lake for a family reunion, and he says he hooked a few other tanks during that time that could have been record-book contenders.
“I hooked probably three other fish during that trip that felt bigger. I just couldn’t get them in,” Goettsche, who owns Mama Hog Fishing Rods, tells Outdoor Life.
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He says he fished every day of the reunion trip, sometimes alone and other times with family members. They were primarily trolling plugs, using Mama Hog Big Boar medium-heavy rods and the same techniques he’s honed on his home lake, Flaming Gorge Reservoir. The “Gorge,” as it’s known by locals, is widely considered the top trophy lake trout fishery in the West. Goettsche says he’s spent a lot of his time “paying dues up there,” and learning valuable lessons that he’s carried over to other lakes like Payette.
“It was just good, clean fun. And we caught a lot of big fish,” Goettsche says of the trip. “My Uncle Jim, he caught a fish that could have been even longer [than mine] … It was so big that we looked up the state [length] record and we were like, ‘Damn dude, we could have probably beat that.’ So we decided to pay attention to those bigger fish, and we just kept catching ‘em.”
Goettsche says he was trolling in about 80 feet of water when the record-sized laker hit his plug. He played the fish carefully to keep it hooked. (He says that instead of relying on treble hooks, he uses less aggressive single hooks that make releasing fish easier.)
After measuring the giant lake trout in his landing net and taking the necessary photos, Goettsche gave the fish some time to recover and then released it back into the depths.
“I release all my big fish. Always,” he says. “These trophy [lakers] are special, and catch and release works. It keeps the giants around … And, you know, that fish that I caught, it could be even bigger when it’s caught again the next time.”
Keeping those trophy fish around and healthy is also a matter of sound fishery management, which requires a balance between the amount of forage in a given lake and its game fish populations. Lake trout eat more than other coldwater species, and when that predator-prey balance gets out of whack, lakers can suffer and even starve.
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This is precisely what happened on Payette Lake in the early 2000s, according to IDFG, when Payette’s population of kokanee, a primary food source for lakers, started dropping. As a result, biologists noticed the lake trout getting thinner and thinner in the years that followed.
“It wasn’t uncommon to catch a 30-inch fish that looked like a snake,” IDFG regional fisheries manager Jordan Messner explained in the agency’s announcement Monday.
In 2018, IDFG started a restoration project on Payette that involved stocking more kokanee and taking smaller lake trout (under 27 inches) out of the population. IDFG says more than 3,000 of those smaller lakers have been removed since then, which has allowed the remaining fish to grow faster and fatter. Payette’s biologists have noticed these changes, and the agency says that in 2023, they caught and released a massive lake trout that weighed 54 pounds.
Goettsche is an angler and not a biologist. But he says he’s noticed similar effects at the Gorge as the reservoir’s kokanee-laker balance has shifted.
“We’ve seen it on Flaming Gorge, where kokanee have been overfished. So keeping that balance, and fishing responsibly, those are very important,” Goettsche says. “And I have the pictures to prove it. In years past, I’d catch a couple good ones [on Payette]. I’d maybe get a couple bites every other day, but trophy fishing was slow … And on this last trip, I caught 12 fish over 20 pounds.”
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