Went down to otter creek today 8/8. Didn't get fishing til about 12 and fished til 6. We landed 13 or 14 rainbows. The best bow got off before we could land him. All except one of the rainbows had sores/wounds from parasites but they were all fat and healthy.
But later in the day we stumbled upon the biggest brown trout I've ever seen in Utah. Unfortunately he was belly up and dead. After scooping him up we got some measurements. He was a bit rank and had been dead awhile. He was so big even the birds weren't eating him. Measured right at about 27 inches. I just wish I could have caught him while he was alive.
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They get bigger lol
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That's a brute of a brown!
Oh and Wyo307, way to try and diminish the original post...
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With as far forward as your arms are xtended toward the camera, I am not sure yours is bigger....
....back to the original post, though. Too bad that fish died and isn't still around. FWIW, the section of stream from Otter Creek to Paiute has long put out big browns.
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The
thing is, someone may have caught him and then released him, but then he died due to stress and exhaustion. Happens more than you think.
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Yeah I was wondering what he could have died from. I didn't see any obvious sign of hook injury or anything. And in the pic where I'm holding him, I'm holding it out and to the side away from my body because he was so stinky. I didn't bother pinching the tail when I measured either. He would have probably been pushing 28 inches with the tail pinched.
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Sometimes fish just die. I once came upon a very large Bass that had died and floated up. I netted it, and it was not yet starting to stink.
I looked for hook damage and found none, looked for prop damage or signs of infection or disease and found none. I then looked into the deep throat and found a sculpin minnow, tail first.
The Bass had taken a sculpin tail first and the sculpin had stuck out its fins and not only got stuck in the throat but the sharp fins had penetrated the throat. I am sure that is what killed it.
Yes, sometimes fish just die.
PS, nice Brown, and yes they do get bigger, but a 27" or 28" is still a very very very nice brown.
Yeah that's true, it could have died from old age or a number of things. I found it interesting that all the bows we caught had sores on them but this brown didn't have any noticeable sores.
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[#0000FF]The sores are most likely "anchor worms". They are a skin parasite that attacks rainbows when summer water temps get above a level that breaks down the protective mucus barrier on their skin.
Browns seem to be more resistant...but they often develop a nasty white fungus on their bodies late in the year...about spawning time. That seems to show up more in streams...like the Provo River...than in lakes. Might be because they can go deeper and colder in lakes than in summer warmed streams.
Back in the days when DWR still planted rainbows in Pineview the anchor worm problem on the bows got to be really gross in the late summer. We called the fish "pizza sides".
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