For Australian angler Paul Rahman, fishing all night and casting through the cold is part of the game when hunting for trophy-sized brown trout in New Zealand. At least that’s how Rahman caught his new world-record brown on the South Island this April. The beast of a trout weighed 39 pounds 2 ounces, and it was recently accepted by the International Game Fish Association as the new line-class world record in the 8-pound category.
Rahman caught the record brown from the Ohau Canal in Twizel. It’s part of a unique system of hydropower canals fed by glacial lakes, and most of the canals have salmon farms along them. This combination of cold, oxygenated water and salmon feed drifting in from the farms produces some of the largest trout on the planet. It is not a coincidence that the IGFA all-tackle world record brown trout, which was caught in 2022 and weighed 44 pounds 5 ounces, also came from the Ohau Canal.
“That fish I caught in April, I think that was the eighth night I had been out in a row,” Rahman tells Outdoor Life. Because of the time difference between the U.S. and Melbourne, where Rahman lives, we exchanged messages through social media. “The previous seven nights we had landed some really good fish up to to 30 pounds. And when I hooked this fish I knew it was big.”
Rahman, who plans to start guiding in the Twizel area next year, says he travels there to fish at least once a month. He and his friends will also fish the canals during the day, primarily drifting salmon eggs, and 95 percent of the trout they catch are rainbows. But he says nighttime is when the giant, predatory browns come out to feed along the canal edges, and they’ll target these brutes by casting soft baits from the banks.
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“A typical night will be from 8pm til 5am, long cold hours just casting all night,” says Rahman, whose Instagram page is filled with pictures of giant trout caught in the dark. “By no means is it easy, as fish pictures can be deceiving. But if you fish solid for a few days, you will most definitely catch a few nice ones over 20 pounds.”
It was late at night on April 15 when Rahman hooked the huge brown. He says he battled the fish for 30 minutes before jumping into the canal to net it. He and his buddy weighed the fish on a digital scale that had been certified by the IGFA, and then they let the nearly 40-pound trout go. Rahman says it swam off strong. (The video below is of a different brown trout they released in the same canal, which weighed closer to 20 pounds.)
“There a lot bigger browns than this one, though. 100 percent. I’ve lost two in the last nine months that would have pushed 50 pounds,” he adds. “Also, just to clarify a misconception. A lot of people say the Twizel canal fish shouldn’t be counted as records because they’re hatchery fish. This statement is a complete lie … There are zero trout stockings. All Twizel trout are wild and breed naturally in the wild.”
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