Robert Gregory and his two college roommates, Josh Clark and Tanner Smith, were on a New Year’s Eve mission to catch a state-record Yellowstone cutthroat trout. The morning of Dec. 31, they went out to Henry’s Lake in eastern Idaho near Yellowstone National Park. It was bright and sunny with temps around 12 degrees.
“We got there early and drilled some holes near the southwest part of the lake in about 7 feet of water,” Gregory tells Outdoor Life. “The lake is pretty shallow and about mid-day we decided to move closer to shore because we weren’t catching fish.”
The three anglers are all fisheries management students at Brigham Young University’s Rexburg campus. They moved to an area in about three feet of water that still had 8 inches of solid ice.
“We drilled new holes through the ice early that afternoon, and I dropped a small 1.5-inch Kastmaster silver spoon all the way to the bottom and jigged it a bit to stir up the sediment,” says the 23-year-old angler. “I’ve had good luck in the past doing that, clouding the water with a lure. I think it draws trout to the discolored water because they believe it’s a baitfish or something to eat.”
Gregory had tipped his spoon with a piece of earthworm and a kernel of corn. His lure sat motionless near the bottom. When the water cleared under the hole, a trout took his spoon just a few feet below the ice.
“The fish slammed it hard and took some line off my spinning reel,” Gregory says. “With light monofilament line, it took a while to reel and fight it up near the hole. Tanner helped me and reached in and scooped [the fish] up and out onto the ice.”
Gregory kept the fish. (The limit on Henry’s Lake is two trout, except during springtime when it’s catch-and-release only.) The three anglers knew the cutthroat was a potential record when they got home and put it on a basic food scale, where it weighed roughly 3 pounds. But Gregory knew it would have to be weighed on a certified scale to qualify as a record, so he froze the fish.
“Three days later I was visiting my parents in Mackay, and I brought the thawed fish to a grocery store to have it weighed,” he explains. “It weighed 3.075 pounds and was 19 inches long.”
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Gregory still has his record cutthroat trout frozen, and he’s not sure if he’ll have it mounted by a taxidermist. He says he’ll likely cook and eat it, as college life can be a belt-tightening experience.
“I know there are bigger cutthroats in Henry’s Lake than my record 3-pounder. Last summer Tanner caught one that was bigger, but he didn’t weigh it,” he says. “Someone will break my trout record on Henry’s. I think that’s great and encourage other anglers to try and beat it.”
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