It’s o-fish-al: A Bethesda man broke the Maryland record for the largest rainbow trout caught in the state.
“It’s the trout of my life,” Jean-Philippe Lartigue, 65, told MoCo360 on Tuesday.
Lartigue caught a 17.44-pound fish on Saturday, breaking the previous record in the non-tidal division of 14.2 pounds in 1987, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said in a press release.
“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,” Recreational Fisheries Outreach Coordinator Erik Zlokovitz said in the release.
Lartigue hooked the trout while fishing in the section of Antietam Creek running through Devil’s Backbone County Park in Washington County. Lartigue said he is familiar with the river and was fishing there alone on Saturday, expecting to catch smaller fish, which is typical.
“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 said in the department’s release. “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.”
To catch the trout, he used a “12-foot crappie-style rod, spinning reel, eight-pound test monofilament line, a small split-shot weight and a No. 8 hook baited with a natural worm,” according to the DNR.
“Lartigue is French and originally from Morocco, where he learned from his father the European style of fishing natural baits with long rods for trout,” the DNR release said. “The long rod helps to control the drift and presentation of natural baits in swift stream currents.”
Lartigue fought the fish for 30 minutes.
“I didn’t have a net, so I had to go inside the water to grab the fish. it was a long fight, and finally, the fish was tired, and I took it by my hand and pulled it out of the water,” said Lartigue, who cut his hand on the fish’s teeth while he was hauling it onto a rocky bank of the river.
“I had no choice; I didn’t have a net,” he said.
He said he has extensive fishing experience, which helped him in this endeavor, having fished in Africa and numerous U.S. states, including Montana, Wyoming and Utah.
Passionate about fishing, he learned to fish at a very young age. Now retired, Lartigue worked in Africa for many years, advising governments in fisheries management after getting a doctorate in marine biology in France.
Lartigue then moved to Maryland, where he raised his family. He said he has two sons, ages 28 and 30, who he taught to fish when they were young.
Lartigue said he previously has caught large trout but nothing as big as the record-breaking 32-incher. He also said that he has eaten one part of the trout so far, and it was “very good.”