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Dentry: Manitoba angler fights off brook trout mark challenge

Published January 31, 2007 at midnight

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After all the gossip and fury, Tim Matheson's world record brook trout officially is reconciled. As far as the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame is concerned, the big char the modest Manitoba lodge owner caught and released in October was a brook trout, not a splake.

It is, in fact, the Hayward, Wis.-based record-keeping organization's newest catch-and-release world record fish and almost certainly the biggest brook trout anyone ever caught.

"It is official," Darlene Overman, an NFWFHF spokeswoman, confirmed Tuesday. "It was caught Oct. 21 at Barbe Lake in Manitoba. The catch was witnessed and photographed and it appears everything was in order."

After a partner took photos, Matheson, of Sherridon, Manitoba, released the 29-inch-long fish with the 21-inch girth, brookie spots and bright orange belly. A standard length-to-weight formula estimates its weight was 16 pounds - or 1 1/2 pounds heavier than the kept world record brook trout.

That venerable icon was caught in 1916 in northwestern Ontario's Nipigon River. It weighed 14 1/2 pounds. Until now, no other bullish brookie has challenged it.

This challenge is only academic since measurements and weights are apples and oranges and there were no released-fish records in the old days. In 1916, everybody kept everything, and nobody measured anything. You had to plop a dead fish on a certified scale to claim a record.

Matheson says that's something he will not do.

"I own a small fishing lodge in Manitoba and I absolutely practice and believe in catch and release," the owner of Kenanow Lodge wrote in an e-mail to me after his fish tale appeared in my Nov. 29 column.

"It is what I do. When I caught the brookie, I did not know I had a potential world record, but I would not change what I did either way."

The gossip and fury started when some cynical armchair anglers decided a 16-pound, undead brook trout had to be suspect and that the fish probably was a splake (brook trout-lake trout hybrid).

However, Barbe Lake's trophy trout catches have been well-documented in Manitoba's Master Angler records. The lake has produced big rainbow trout and several brookies nearly as big as Matheson's but never a single lake trout that might have cross-spawned with brookies to produce natural hybrid splake.

Matheson adds, "Manitoba biologists have stated that no splake or lake trout have ever been introduced in Barbe Lake and that as far as they are concerned there is no question as to the species being anything but a brook trout."

He confesses to some bewilderment over the Web chat storm that has thundered around his catch.

Some of that is understandable, as claims of the biggest anything - especially fish - are apt to erupt in controversy while making the claimant a target on the skyline.

But in this case, ample opportunity exists for contrarians to get off the recliner and prove their point.

Thanks to Matheson's devout catch-and-release ethics and the Hall of Fame's acceptance of catch-and-release records, the confirmed biggest brookie in the world still swims in Barbe Lake. Catch it yourself and do a mouth swab for DNA.