Trib Tight Lines Column Thursday

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One for the record books
[url "mailto:brettp@sltrib.com"][#000000]Brett Prettyman
The Salt Lake Tribune[/#000000][/url]
[url "http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_3154969#"][/url] Richard Pittenger caught this record 16-pound splake at Fish Lake. (Courtesy of Richard Pittenger) Some anglers pore over fishing records and memorize the weight of existing marks, hoping to find a way to get into the books. Others look at records only after catching something big. Richard Pittenger definitely comes from the latter group. During a last-minute Labor Day trip to southern Utah, in the middle of the night at Fish Lake, Pittenger landed a fish he didn't even know existed - a 16-pound, 4-ounce hybrid trout.
He thought the fish might be large enough to break some kind of record. "At first I thought it was a lake trout and then a brook trout," said Pittenger, a Pennsylvania native now living in Salt Lake City. "I started looking at the records and found the splake and realized that is what it was." Back home, Pittenger took the 34-inch hybrid between a lake trout and a brook trout to Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) offices for positive identification.
The biologists sent him to a grocery store for an official weight. The fish weighed exactly 1 pound more than the previous record, set by Mitchell Stewart in 1999, also at Fish Lake.
The story starts with Pittenger's fishing buddy Andrew Moger and his father inviting him along to go rabbit hunting. "We just decided at the last minute to go fishing. We got there around 10 p.m. We had been catching little rainbows with rainbow Power Bait when all of the sudden my rod took off," Pittenger said. "I thought it was a carp or something."
Pittenger [url "http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N2614.Integrent.com/B1587407;abr=!ie4;abr=!ie5;sz=300x250;ord=13297 ?"][/url]

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feels a little guilty about landing the record on only his second trip to Fish Lake. "Andrew has been fishing there since he was a little kid and I just moved here. He had never seen a fish like that caught, especially from shore," Pittenger said. "He was kind of jealous." Since the Sept. 5 landing, Pittenger and Moger have made several trips back to Fish Lake hoping to catch another big splake, without any luck.
Pittenger is not the only angler to set a splake record at Fish Lake. DWR officials confirmed earlier this week that Stacy Willden of Centerfield set the new spearfishing record for splake, with a 30-inch, 13-pound, 5-ounce fish taken Sept. 29. "I'm surprised by these two recent big splake," said Tom Pettengill, sport fishing director for the DWR. "I had kind of given up on seeing any really big ones." Pettengill said it is possible splake in Utah could reach up to 18 pounds given the right circumstances.
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Contact Brett Prettyman at brettp@sltrib.com or 801-257-8902. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
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[Kraizee_Skot]

[font "Impact"][#ff4040][size 3]Cool article. Talk about being freakin lucky. He should have went to Idaho and bought some lottery tickets, I bet he would have won.[cool][/size][/#ff4040][/font]
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