Gavin Boggs of Davenport, Washington, was fishing Lake Roosevelt with a buddy on Feb. 11 when he hooked one thing heavy in deep water. At first he thought the fish was a giant walleye. It turned out to be a state-record lake whitefish.
“I was targeting walleye at a depth of around 75 feet using a four-inch swimbait,” Boggs advised the Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. “We did mark a lot of fish on the fish-finder and had caught one walleye before this big fish took my lure.”
Boggs fought the hefty whitefish for a couple of minutes, nonetheless satisfied it was one other large walleye till the 2 males lastly received it within the internet.
“I carefully let the fish do its thing down below the boat and then when it came to the surface and we netted the fish, I was totally surprised,” mentioned Boggs. “I’ve never targeted lake whitefish in Lake Roosevelt. It is my favorite place to fish for smallmouth bass and walleye, and this has changed my mind about fishing for lake whitefish.”
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Boggs referred to as his father, who did a fast on-line search and discovered that the fish could possibly be a brand new state report. Boggs then stowed his catch in a cooler and drove to Davenport Family Foods, the place it was weighed on a licensed scale at 7.86 kilos. The fish measured 26 inches lengthy, with a 16-inch girth. That simply topped the earlier state report for the species, a 7.5-pound fish that was caught from Cox Lake in 2021.
WDFW licensed Boggs’ state-record lake whitefish inside every week of when he first submitted the report paperwork. It’s the primary state-record fish of 2023, in accordance with the company.
Whitefish in Washington State
There are two species of whitefish residing in Washington State’s waterways. Mountain whitefish are a local species that may be present in rivers and streams on the east facet of the Cascade Mountains. They’re frequent in river programs all through the West, the place they’re usually caught by anglers fishing for trout.
Lake whitefish, alternatively, are species native to the Great Lakes and launched in Washington. WDFW explains that the species was seemingly introduced West by settlers through the late 1800s. After being launched to giant waterbodies like Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille and Montana’s Flathead Lake, they made their method into the Columbia River earlier than the river was impounded by a sequence of enormous dams.
“They quickly adapted to Washington waters and eventually got locked in once the dams were built,” WDFW biologist Danny Garrett explains. “They now flourish in the upper Columbia River and large lakes and reservoirs, allowing anglers easy access to a great fighting fish.”
Lake Roosevelt (formally referred to as Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake) lies within the Upper Columbia River Basin in north-central Washington. Formed by the development of Grand Coulee Dam in 1942, the impoundment stretches roughly 150 miles from the dam up into Canada.
As Boggs alluded to, walleye and smallmouth bass are the star angling points of interest at Lake Roosevelt. WDFW biologists have identified for years, nevertheless, that the lake additionally harbors some really large lake whitefish. These fish had been the dominant catch through the company’s 2022 gill netting survey, and final fall they caught a 9.5-pound lake whitefish that dwarfed Boggs’ record-sized catch.
“Hopefully, this record will increase the excitement for lake whitefish at Lake Roosevelt,” Garrett mentioned.