KEMMERER, Wyo. — Three tiger trout records in three years. That’s what has been going on near Kemmerer.
Shelby Holder, of Kemmerer, set a new record on June 6, with a 14.95-pound tiger trout caught in the Hams Fork River. The fish was 31.2 inches long.
According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD), Holder shattered the previous record of 12.77 pounds set last year by a 13-year-old Kemmerer resident fishing near the Viva Naughton Reservoir. That fish broke an 11.93-pound record from 2023 by a Cheyenne resident fishing in the Viva Naughton Reservoir.
Holder was fishing for rainbow trout, but he said he saw the tiger trout “come up from behind a couple of rainbows and try to run them out of the hole,” so he decided to try to land that fish instead. Holder was using a 1-weight fly rod and a wooly bugger on an 8-pound-test line as a leader. It took 30 minutes to land the fish.
The tiger trout is a hybrid produced by crossing a female brown trout with a male brook trout. According to WGFD, the tiger trout is sterile and cannot reproduce. They have been stocked in Wyoming since 2005, and specifically in Viva Naughton Reservoir since 2014. Tiger trout eat nongame fish such as Utah chub, which fatten them up for anglers. And since tiger trout don’t reproduce, they cannot overpopulate the waters where they are stocked.