A nearly 6-pound tiger trout has become the new Arizona record, the Arizona Game and Fish Department announced Tuesday. Not only did angler Carl Erickson pull the marble-patterned fish from the same lake that produced the last one, but it’s now the second time in six months that the state tiger trout record has been busted.
Ericson caught the fish at Woods Canyon Lake on a crawfish-imitating crankbait. Erickson thought his big tiger trout could perhaps break the state record for the species, so he contacted AGFD personnel to notify them of his catch.
Erickson’s trout weighed 5 pounds, 15.4 ounces on certified scales and measured 23.5 inches long. AGFD sportfish program director Curt Gill confirmed that Ericson’s fish has been officially weighed, measured, and certified as Arizona’s new tiger trout record. The previous record tiger trout was four ounces smaller than Erickson’s fish. Brian Morgan of Glendale, Arizona, caught the 5-pound, 11.8-ounce fish in December 2022. Prior to that, the record hadn’t been broken since May 2020.
Woods Canyon is a 55-acre mountain lake located 7,500 feet above sea level about 30 miles northeast of Payson. It is one of a series of canyon waters in the area, known collectively as the Rim Lakes. AGFD stocks it with brown, rainbow, and tiger trout.
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Tiger trout are a sterile hybrid between a female brown trout and a male brook trout. The cross can occur naturally, but most tiger trout are produced in hatcheries for stocking. The vast majority of tiger trout are caught in the U.S., but IGFA line class records for the species have come from the United Kingdom and Australia, too. An angler in Wyoming broke that state’s tiger trout record this month, and Cathy Clegg caught the world-record IGFA tiger trout from Washington State’s Loon Lake in August 2022. The fish weighed 27 pounds, 6 ounces.