Landing The Big One - Again Pend Oreille’s 37-Pound Trout Reinstated In The World Record Book

Henrietta Hamlet admits to being angry with her husband that evening 50 years ago. Wes Hamlet had been fishing at Lake Pend Oreille all day and he was late for dinner.

Even when the Coeur d’Alene grocer called home and said he’d caught a big fish, neither of them had any idea it would be such a huge story.

“He brought the fish home, and I was sort of disgusted,” said Henrietta, who is 87 and still living in Coeur d’Alene. “People were so excited, they wanted him to bring it back to Sandpoint. He was running around posing for pictures, and I had the kids to take care of.”

That was Nov. 25, 1947, the day Wes Hamlet caught the world record 37-pound Kamloops rainbow trout.

The story has been told before, and even the proud family of the deceased angler probably would have let it rest had it not been for a glaring newspaper headline last August.

A 33-pound rainbow caught in the Kootenai River near Libby, Mont., was heralded as the new world record.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Henrietta. “I thought everyone knew about Wes’s record.”

Hamlet’s fish was one of the most publicized trophy catches of its time.

Some bars and restaurants around Lake Pend Oreille still have Ross Hall photos of the fish hanging on their walls.

Hamlet was fishing with Coeur d’Alene resident Tony Moen, who is now 84.

“We had a 14-foot wooden boat out of Garfield Bay and were fishing almost in the middle of the lake,” Moen said.

Henrietta said only one angler could fish at a time out of the boat because the other person had to bail to keep it afloat.

Moen said it wasn’t that bad, “but it was a little silly being out that far, looking back on it.”

Hamlet was trolling a wooden Martin herring scale plug behind about 400 feet of 40-pound Sunset nylon braided line when his Montague rod doubled over.

The fish stripped about 150 feet of line off his Pfleuger Capitol reel on the first run and jumped three times. It was Hamlet’s first Kamloops rainbow even though he had fished for the monster ‘bows 12 times.

“We didn’t have a net big enough to bring the fish aboard, so we gaffed it,” Moen said. “Then we just kept fishing until about dark. The fish hadn’t really fought that hard. We didn’t have any idea how big it was, but figured around 25 pounds.”

Hamlet and Moen didn’t touch another fish that day, but it’s strange they didn’t pay more attention to the trophy in the boat.

They were registered in the Lake Pend Oreille fishing derby, and a 36-pound record rainbow had already been caught to enormous fanfare that week.

Indeed, Lake Pend Oreille’s trout had been making history since the Kamloops introduced from British Columbia had reached maturity in 1944.

“Since the first big Kamloops were taken from the lake in 1945, fish from the ‘big hole’ have been listed every year in (Field & Stream) magazine’s listings of largest fish caught on the continent,” said a 1957 story in The Spokesman-Review.

“The banner year was 1947, when Pend Oreille fish took 10 top awards and nine of the 10 honorable mentions. Largest fish that year was the 37-pounder, which still reigns as world champ.”

But on that day in 1947, Hamlet and Moen weren’t that excited about the trout, even though Hamlet’s largest fish to that point was a six-pound cutthroat from Priest Lake, Idaho.

They finally weighed the fish at Garfield Bay around 4 p.m., after it had lost a pound or so of blood into the bottom of the boat from the gaff wound.

That got them pumped up.

They weighed it again at Coeur d’Alene and immediately drew a crowd. Photos were rushed to Spokane and then flown to Seattle where they were transmitted far and wide over the Associated Press wire.

The Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce, in a tizzy that the fish was in Coeur d’Alene, asked Wes to drive back so subsequent stories and photos would have a Sandpoint dateline, Henrietta said.

“He posed for so many photos, his hands were scraped and sore from holding the fish,” she said. “He even dropped the fish in the lake at one point.

“Wes caught the fish many more times in his dreams in the next few weeks. I was all beat up from him thrashing around at night.”

The fish was frozen and put on display in Coeur d’Alene, Sandpoint and even in the lobby of the Davenport Hotel in Spokane.

People lined up and passed by the fish with slack jaws as though they were looking at the body of royalty in a casket, Henrietta said.

Then, with Wes’s blessing, the Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce confiscated the frozen fish and flew it to New York for the publicity of presenting it to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

That was the last the Hamlet family saw of the trophy fish. Henrietta was content to simply have the record in the family.

“That’s why I was so upset to see that story about a 33-pound world record,” she said. “Even though Wes died in 1983, the record is still his.”

Somehow, Hamlet’s record had been lost in the shuffle of record keepers.

At the turn of the century, biologists had listed at least 16 strains of rainbow trout, including two strains of Kamloops.

“This was unmanageable for the purposes of record keeping,” said Glenda Kelly, biologist for the International Game Fish Association. History has changed the habitats for these fish, but genetically they’re all the same, even the steelhead that run to saltwater.”

The IGFA, founded in 1939 to keep saltwater records, had made a decision to lump all rainbows, including steelhead, into one category when the association took jurisdiction of Field & Stream’s freshwater records in 1978, said director Michael Leech.

Because a 42-pound, 2-ounce steelhead caught in the saltwater off Bell Island, Alaska, was already on the IGFA books, Hamlet’s record was never recognized by IGFA.

But the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, which has made the distinction between inland rainbows and saltwater rainbows, had lost track of the Hamlet trout, too.

“I can’t explain it,” said Ted Dzialo, NFFHF director in Hayward, Wis.

“It was brought to our attention in 1992 in a letter written by Jack McNeel of the Idaho Fish and Game Department in Coeur d’Alene. We wrote back to the department asking for documentation, but they didn’t have any. That’s often the case with states. They throw these historical records away.”

Strangely, no one thought of talking to Henrietta Hamlet, who has a thick scrapbook of memorabilia on the largest rainbow ever caught by an angler in freshwater.

Much has been lost over the years.

The plug that duped the fish was taken from a display in Sandpoint.

Someone pilfered from the scrapbook the personal letter of congratulations to Wes from Eisenhower.

“We weren’t as careful with this as we should have been,” Henrietta said, stroking the scrapbook.

Nevertheless, it still holds more than enough documentation to satisfy world record requirements:

The entry from the Lake Pend Oreille fishing derby with witness signatures verifying the weight.

Dozens of newspaper clippings document the catch, including a photo from The Spokane Chronicle, Dec. 2, 1947, featuring Eisenhower holding Wes’s trout.

Pages from Field & Stream magazine’s listing of record fishes.

A March 1949 story from Sports Afield, which pondered whether another world record would come that year, featured Wes with the record rainbow and a shot of Bing Crosby with a midget fish.

Outdoor Life’s June 1980 feature included Wes’s trout in a story headlined, “Four Records That Won’t Be Broken.”

Wes’s fish was featured in advertisements by tackle companies.

The Saturday Evening Post of May 1, 1948, included a promotion for railroad travel in the Pacific Northwest. The ad featured Wes and his fish under the headline, “Biggest RB ever Caught!”

“People thought he was getting rich with that fish,” Henrietta said. “He got little things here and there, and a camper trailer. But all added up, the stuff he got was worth less than $1,000.

“The IRS didn’t believe it either. They were on his back for two years.”

The scrapbook also holds letters from as far away as Japan asking Wes for fishing advice.

Some people wrote to see if they were related to him.

A Florida man questioned the wisdom of killing such a large fish, figuring it would have been better to let it live and spawn.

The letters, which came across the country with a 3-cent stamps, were addressed simply to Wes Hamlet, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

“This is the 50th anniversary of the year Wes caught the fish,” Henrietta said in November. “I’d like to see the record recognized again, but nobody from Sandpoint that was involved with it is still alive.”

Her three daughters, who posed with Wes and the fish for photos the day of the catch, chipped in their support.

Donna, who was 4 years old at the time, is now Donna Runge, a counselor working in Coeur d’Alene.

She helped Henrietta send copies of important documents from the scrapbook to the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame.

Just before Christmas, Dzialo faxed a memo with the good news.

“Checked all kinds of sources and they do refer to this fish as a world record… ,” the memo said. “Our records committee has decided to recognize this fish as the all-tackle world record.”

So the 33-pound rainbow from Montana got its four months of fame at the top of the heap. But in the next publication from the Hall of Fame, it will have to settle for second place to the granddaddy of them all.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: KAMLOOPS TROUT Kamloops is the name given by a biologist in 1892 to reband rainbow trout native to Kamloops and Kootenay lakes in British Columbia. The range of the Kamloops trout has been expanded greatly by hatchery introductions. A 52-pound, 2-ounce specimen was caught in Jewel Lake, British Columbia. The large size of the Kamloops trout probably is due to its co-existence with kokanee for several thousand years. Kamloops adapted into effective predators on the kokanee, unlike other rainbow trout, which feed primarily on small aquatic insects and zooplankton.