Roda wasn’t about to let this one get away

“I first saw him more than four years ago. I knew where he lived, what hole he preferred.

“He was my Moby Dick.”

That’s Evan Roda, 28, summarizing his long, deliberate pursuit of a tiger trout that has been measured at more than double the weight of the current Washington state record.

The Spokane Valley angler caught the lunker at Fish Lake in Spokane County on Tuesday.

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife district biologist Chris Donley verified the brown trout/brook trout hybrid at 13.75 pounds, 31 inches long and 19.75 inches in girth.

When the paperwork is complete, those figures will clearly wipe out the official state tiger trout record of 6.26 pounds caught in Lenice Lake in July 2006.

“This is a phenomenal fish,” Donley said. “But what’s even more remarkable is that (Roda) came up to me nearly five years ago and said he was going to catch the state record tiger trout out of Fish Lake.

“That’s like Babe Ruth calling his home run shot (to center field).

“When he showed up here at the department office, I could see the pride swelling out of him as he walked in and I knew he’d done it.”

The odds of a trout in a 47-acre general-season fishing lake living long enough – perhaps 9 years – to grow that large are roughly the same as the chance that Bigfoot is lurking in Manito Park.

“I took a close look at the fish’s mandible and it’s all torn up,” Donley said. “The fish clearly won some previous battles.”

This isn’t the first state record tiger trout Roda has hooked.

“About six years ago I caught a nice tiger trout that I weighed at 4 pounds,” he said. “I knew it was a large fish, but I put it on my stringer and kept fishing. Then I wrapped it up and my mom put it on the barbecue. Later that week I got around to looking it up and found out the state record at that time was 1.78 pounds.

“That stuck with me for a long time, and that’s what made me determined to catch another record.

“Four years ago, I was at Fish Lake in the fall just before it closes, and my heart nearly stopped when this big fish followed my lure. When you’ve been catching the usual 15-16 inch trout, something big enough to eat those fish catches your attention.”

From that moment, the hunt was on.

“I work in the fishing industry,” he said, noting that he’s currently employed at the Post Falls Cabela’s store, “so I try to get out and fish as much different water as possible. But my friends can tell you, that five or six times a year, I’d tell them I had a date with a special fish.

“I found him every year. He’d follow in my cast every now and then and I figured out he was interested in only one or two of my lures.

“After a couple years I started getting paranoid about it. I was hoping that some kid or somebody didn’t stumble into the fish by sheer dumb luck.”

What scared him even more was the possibility the Fish and Wildlife Department might rehabilitate the lake.

Fish Lake was treated with rotenone to eradicate scrap fish from its waters in 1998 and restocked with brown trout and brook trout.

Tiger trout, a brown-brook hybrid, were first stocked in the lake as catchable-size fish in 2001.

“Chris Donley said they were considering doing it again and I begged him to wait so he wouldn’t kill my fish.”

On Tuesday, Roda was in a boat casting a Lucky Craft minnow-style lure on 8-pound-test line when he ended his quest.

“I’m reluctant to tell much more,” he said. “I don’t think there’s another trout like this in Fish Lake, but now that I can check him off my list, I’ll be moving on to the next record somewhere else.”

Hot anglers: In 31 years of outdoors reporting, I believe this is this is the first time I’ve written back-to-back columns on Spokane County anglers who have caught state record fish in a two-week period.

Pamela Ramsden of Deer Park caught the state record northern pike minnow in the Snake River on May 16.

Hot angling: Fish biologist Chris Donley weaved a clear picture of the current fishing opportunities when asked this week how the area’s fishing lakes were doing.

“Fishing is phenomenal pretty much everywhere,” he said, noting that water temperatures are ideal and fish are feeding.

“This is prime time. If you can’t catch a fish now, you should consider taking up needlepoint.”