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Jean-Philippe Lartigue of Bethesda, a retired fisheries biologist originally from Morocco, caught the trout in the section of Antietam Creek running through Devil’s Backbone County Park in Washington County on Saturday, Feb. 10.
“I knew the fish was a very large trout, but I did not see how big it was at the beginning of the fight,” Lartigue told the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.
“I finally saw the fish, and it made two very long runs to the opposite side of the creek and was hard to move. I also had to keep the fish away from some bridge abutments, which could have cut the line easily…After a very long 30-minute fight, I was able to tire out the fish and grabbed it by the jaw with my fingers since I did not have a landing net large enough.”
The fish was taken to Ernst’s Country Market in Clear Spring to be weighed and have its species confirmed by Maryland DNR’s director of freshwater fisheries and hatcheries, John Mullican. It measured 32 inches long and weighed in at a whopping 17.44 pounds.
Lartigue’s catch doesn’t just beat the previous record of 14.2 pounds caught by Dave Schroyer on October 21, 1987 — it “shatters” it, officials said.
“We are extremely impressed by the weight of the fish, which bests the old record by over 3 pounds, a record that many of us in the department thought would never be broken,” said Recreational Fisheries Outreach Coordinator Erik Zlokovitz.
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