June 9th was a special day for Grant Bentz. He caught a 14 lb., 12 oz. rainbow trout, a new state record.
The previous Virginia record rainbow trout at14-7 had been caught in June 1993 by Michael Lowe in Greer’s Pond. Bentz’s fish, caught in Spring Creek, broke the record by 5 ounces.
Bentz, of McGaheysville, Virginia, caught his monster rainbow on private property where he has permission to fish. “It’s basically where the stream goes from flat water to high gradient and rapids, so, trout have the opportunity to grow up and gain some size.
But on June 8, Bentz found the big one. “On my last cast that day, I was throwing a Gulp minnow on a jig head, and I saw this huge flash deep in the pool. This large head came up and gulped the jig,” Bentz recalled. “I set the hook, and the battle was on. It was five minutes of chasing this fish. I was wearing waders, and I was running up and down the stream, because it couldn’t stop it. It was just so big. I finally got it to the net, but because it was just too heavy, the jig bent, and I lost the fish.
He decided to try again the next day and hooked the same big trout on his first cast. It broke off again.
“I’d lost it twice now, but this had happened to me before on smaller fish,” Bentz said. “I figured I’d just give him a little time to calm down, because larger fish in a small stream like that, they’re hungry all the time. So typically, if you give them some time to forget about what happened, they’ll eat again. So, I visited with the landowner, had a couple cups of coffee, and tried to regroup a little bit.”
After an hour, Bentz returned to the steam and cast a few times. The fish bit again. “It was still a big fight, but I feel like the fish had used up a lot of its energy during the first fight,” he said. “It was still a struggle, but eventually I got him into the net, which was only about half the size it needed to be. I coaxed him up onto the bank, and then actually laid eyes on the fish out of the water.
“I had a really accurate handheld scale with me, and it weighed 14 pounds, 12 ounces.”
When he realized the fish might be a a new state record, he stopped at the Stokesville Market in Mt. Solon to weigh it on their certified scale and have a Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources employee verify it. The next day, he took the fish to the Verona DWR office for official inspection and to fill out the record application.
Bentz plans to get a replica of the fish made, but he did filet and cook the big rainbow.
“There’s a misconception that large trout don’t taste good, but they do,” he said. “This one had crimson filets that looked like a salmon and it tasted great.”
