Richard Courtright, a 20-year-old powerplant inspector from Bethel, Connecticut, caught a massive rainbow trout in the West Branch of the Farmington River on April 11. It was the first legal day of the year to harvest trout in Connecticut, and at 16 pounds, 7.5 ounces, it shattered the old state record of 14 pounds, 10 ounces, set in 1998 in Mansfield Hollow Lake.
Courtright actually saw the fish before hooking it. He spotted the trout’s “rosy red cheek” behind a rock about 10 feet from shore.
“I thought it was a log at first and then I saw its head, and I freaked out,” Courtright told Wired2fish. “I don’t know if it was there all day, but the spot I saw it in, it was pretty camouflaged — I wouldn’t put it past it to just sit there all day unnoticed.”
Battle of Wits
Courtright started casting “everything I had in my tackle box,” including spinners, Rapalas, even salmon eggs. He also tried casting from different angles. Using a favorite old open-face spinning reel, 6-pound test line, a couple weights and size 8 hook, he decided to try a single mealworm, running back to his car to get some.
That’s when the fun started. The big trout hit the mealworm, setting off a fight that Courtright compared to “pulling in a sheet of plywood.” It made a couple big runs downstream and then came back upstream, swimming in circles. Courtright took his time playing the fish because he didn’t want to break his line or pull the hook out.
“I got it to circle close enough one time, and I ‘long-armed’ it with my net,” he said.
Courtright was out on the river early that day taking part in the 76th-annual Riverton Fishing Derby, which ended at 10 a.m., four hours before his record catch at 2 p.m. The day’s festivities drew a slew of anglers and started with a 4 a.m. pancake breakfast at the local fire department.
Trout as Teachers
An interesting side story is that the record trout had just been stocked in the river the day before. According to Matt Devine, a fisheries biologist at the State of Connecticut Fisheries Division, the rainbow fattened up at the Kensington State Fish Hatchery, where it mixed with Atlantic salmon for several years, encouraging the salmon to eat feeder pellets.
Hatchery-raised salmon are sometimes reluctant to eat pellets. The solution is to mix them with trout, which love pellets. When the trout start to feed immediately, it triggers the salmon to feed.
“Sometimes Atlantic salmon just need a little nudge to feed properly,” Devine explained to Wired2fish. “So we have rainbow trout, which feed very aggressively in the hatchery environment, and we keep half a dozen of these rainbows in the same pond as the Atlantic Salmon, and basically they promote a feeding frenzy.”
Hatchery staff put five of the special trigger rainbows, all tagged, which Devine described as ‘giants,” in the river about a quarter-miler mile upstream from where Courtright landed his trout. The record fish was the biggest one stocked the day before the derby.
“These fish reach the end of their potential, whether it’s after spawning or helping other fish eat, and then their job after that is to go make a memory for someone, and that’s exactly what happened,” he said.
A Father and Son Duo
The angler’s father, also named Richard, was watching his son from some rocks above the action but was unable to descend quickly to be by his son’s side because he is recovering from a stroke suffered on March 15. The senior Courtright said he couldn’t believe the size of the trout.
“All I could do was watch,” he said. “I couldn’t even help him net the fish. He did it by himself.”
In search of a scale to weigh the trout, father and son took it to the fish market at a nearby grocery store and got an accurate weight on the store’s scale. They then took the fish to the taxidermist for mounting.
The younger Courtright said the mount will go right above his bed, while the senior Courtwright proudly said news coverage of the catch made his son a bit of a local celebrity. Dad couldn’t believe how many people were congratulating his son.
“Just to be with him and watch him catch the fish, it means a lot to me, you know?” said Richard Sr.
The younger Courtright said the fish was 31 inches long with a girth of 21.25 inches. The world weight record for rainbow trout is 48 pounds, set by Sean Konrad in Canada in 2009. The world length record is 37 inches, caught by Mark Armistead in New Zealand in 2020. You can learn more about the biggest trout ever in our article on world record trout.
