Aaron Goettsche, age 39, is a long-time veteran lake trout troller on his home waters of Utah’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir, a renowned spot for the species. But he likes to take the show on the road occasionally.
Goettsche makes an annual family trip. This year they rented a house near 5,000-acre Payette Lake, located in west-central Idaho near the town of McCall. Goettsche has fished Payette for a couple years and was learning to catch its lakers. This year he trailered his 20-foot aluminum Wellcraft boat nearly 500 miles from his home in Stansbury Park, Utah to west central Idaho – just so he could deep troll using the tactics and skills he’s honed on famed Flaming Gorge.
“The Payette fishing was a little slow at first, but we started to dial ’em in,” Goettsche tells Wired2fish. “My uncle Jim [Goettsche] caught a good one and after pictures we released it. We didn’t think much about checking its length or the state record for lakers. But afterward we thought his fish was bigger than the current record after checking what the record was.”
That’s when they started paying attention to the size of the fish they were catching.
Over the course of the week the Goettsche group caught-and-released a dozen lake trout that Aaron says were 20 pounds or more.
Then on June 19, while fishing alone, Aaron hooked a big trout in 80 feet of water while trolling a large wooden plug 20 feet down off a downrigger.
“It was a big fish, and it fought hard and deep,” says the owner of Utah’s Valley Forklift, LLC. “I’d hooked three others before that one and lost em – and they all were big.”
Goettsche says he battled the fish for about 15 minutes, using one of his own handmade “Mama Hog Fishing Rods.” The fiberglass rods are designed for deep trolling for big fish with revolving-spool reels. He used 50-pound-test line with a 30-pound-test fluorocarbon leader that day. He declined to say what plug make or model he employed.
“I knew it was a stud-size fish by the way it was running, and rolling and twisting,” Goettsche explained. “I couldn’t get the fish to settle down and it was fighting hard up near my boat. I was really worried I was going to lose it like the other first three I had on that morning.”
But he managed to net it, making a video of himself catching it and photos of him with the fish in his boat. He documented its 42-inch length in photos, then released the trout back into Payette Lake.
Goettsche then sent photos of the trout with a length record application to Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game (IDFG).
On July 18, state officials announced Aaron’s laker as the state record catch-and-release lake trout. His fish tops the previous record by half-an-inch, caught by Dylan Smith from Payette Lake in 2018.
State officials say that Payette Lake is on a rebound for big lakers after years of declining big fish available to anglers. The forage populations had diminished, but have recently improved. Anglers are now actively catching and releasing big lakers, which are extremely slow growing, taking years to reach double-digit weight size.
After Aaron caught his record laker and it was announced by IDFG, he was contacted by previous state record laker holder Dylan Smith.
“He was gracious and congratulated me on my catch,” Goettsche said in a phone interview while catching a 20-pound lake trout on his home lake of Flaming Gorge. “I’ve caught lake trout to 47 pounds from Flaming Gorge, and I know there have been bigger fish in Payette. They’re such a great gamefish. I’ll definitely have a replica mount made of my 42-incher, which helped make our summer family trip special.”