BUCKHANNON, W.Va. –– An Upshur County teenager is now the record holder for the West Virginia golden trout. Hunter Rohr, 15, of Buckhannon, and his buddy Bryar Sandy decided to use one day of their recent spring break from school to head up to the Smoke Hole Section of the South Branch in Pendleton County.
The trip was in the middle of the Division of Natural Resources annual Gold Rush stocking event. Hunter felt like there was an opportunity for considerable gain with the right fish.
“We were hoping for a pink tag because I needed a lifetime hunting and fishing license,” he laughed in an interview for West Virginia Outdoors.
During the Gold Rush tagged fish carry certain prizes and a lifetime hunting and fishing license is one of the top ones. After catching a few, Hunter used his polarized glasses to look for trout from the road above riding in the back of his buddy’s pickup truck. He spotted the monster trout from the road and decided to give it a try.
“There was a bunch, but that was the only big one we found,” he explained.
The two friends kept casting upstream of the giant fish and letting the current carry the bait downstream. At one point within the first five casts, Bryar had to fish hooked for a brief few seconds, but he got off and returned to where he was hanging in the current.
“He wasn’t hooked that long and that’s why I kept standing there, I knew eventually he would bite,” Hunter explained.
Turns out he had to stand there for about an hour and a half casting his rig with a steelhead salmon egg upstream and letting it drift down into the strike zone. But eventually, the patience paid off.
“When he took it I wasn’t even sure he had it. I let him eat it and I set the hook and he was really so fat he didn’t even fight that hard. He stuck his head out of the water and shook it and that was it,” explained Hunter.
The fish was in the net after a couple of careful minutes on four-pound test line.
“I use a really long rod, so I can play them a lot better on that four-pound test,” Hunter said.
Once the fish was in the net, there was no doubt in Hunter’s mind what he had done.
“I knew he was probably the state record as soon as I saw him in the net. I knew the records and I knew this fish would crush them,” he said.
The fish was 28.0 inches exactly and 11.84 pounds, both new state records for the golden trout. The old record for length was 27.5 inches for a trout caught in 1987 at Stonecoal Lake in Lewis County by Gerald Estep. The weight record was previously caught during the 2023 Gold Rush at Little Beaver Lake in Raleigh County by Charles Lilly Jr. His fish weighed 9.72 pounds.
Hunter is a freshman student at Buckhannon Upshur High School.