Grant Bentz was driving home from a day of fishing on June 9 with a personal best rainbow trout in his cooler when suddenly it occurred to him to do an online search to see what the current state record was. “I never thought I’d be in this position,” Bentz said. “I’m not a record-chaser, but the existing record had stood for more than 30 years. After I recognized what I had, I figured I had to seize this opportunity.”

The previous Virginia record rainbow trout had been caught in June 1993 by Michael Lowe in Greers Pond. That fish had been 14 lbs., 7 oz. Bentz’s fish, caught in Spring Creek, broke the record by 5 ounces, weighing in at 14 lb., 12 oz. “The previous record had been set prior to the rewriting of the rules, and it came from a trout farm,” Bentz said. “My fish had obviously been stocked at one point, but it had been swimming free and growing up in the wild for a number of years, which is cool.”

Bentz, of McGaheysville, Virginia, caught his monster rainbow on private property where he has permission to fish. “It’s basically where the stream goes from flat water to high gradient and rapids. It seems like bigger trout get to that point and kind of stall out because it’s harder for them to push up past that,” he said. “I’ve fished this stream for probably 20-plus years, and I have caught some really nice trout out of it. It’s not stocked water, it’s all private land, but this stream connects to several other rivers that receive stockings. So, trout have the opportunity to grow up and to gain some size, but I never expected to catch one quite like this. Typically, my good fishing is when the rainbows show up during the spring spawn, traveling upstream. This past spring, I fished this stream several times casually and didn’t really find anything that got me excited.”

But on June 8, he found the big one. “On my last cast that day, I was throwing up a gulp minnow on a jighead, and I saw this huge flash deep in the pool. This large head came up and gulped the jig,” Bentz recalled. “I set the hook, and the battle ensued. It was five minutes of chasing this fish. I was wearing waders, and I was running up and down the stream, because it couldn’t stop it. It was just so big. I finally got it to the net, but because it was just too heavy, the jighead bent, and I lost the fish.

“This happened to me before with big trout, and I knew that because it’s such a small watershed, typically they don’t move very far, so I just didn’t want to give up,” Bentz said. “I decided, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow with a little better equipment.’ But this stream has a lot of brush and overhanging trees, so you can’t use big gear. I stuck with a five-foot ultralight rod, but I came back the next morning spooled up with 10-pound braid and put on a circle hook with a whole nightcrawler I gathered, which seems to be what big trout will eat.”

On his first cast on that second day, Bentz hooked the same big trout. He fought it for another five minutes, and got it right up to his net, but the line had frayed against the trout’s teeth, and snapped before he could land the fish. “The first time I lost it, I estimated it was about 10 pounds, which would put it on par with my personal best in the past. The second time I lost it, I got a better look at it, and I realized the fish might be more like 12 pounds,” Bentz recalled.

“I’d lost it twice now, but this had happened to me before on smaller fish,” Bentz said. “I figured I’d just give him a little time to calm down, because larger fish in a small stream like that, they’re hungry all the time. So typically, if you give them some time to forget about what happened, they’ll eat again. So, I visited with the landowner, had a couple cups of coffee, and tried to regroup a little bit.”

After an hour, Bentz returned to the steam and cast a few times. The fish bit again. “It was still a big fight, but I feel like the fish had used up a lot of its energy during the first fight,” he said. “It was still a struggle, but eventually I got him into the net, which was only about half the size it needed to be. I coaxed him up onto the bank, and then actually laid eyes on the fish out of the water. I thought, ‘Oh, that fish is bigger than 12 pounds!'”

Grant Bentz and his new Virginia state record rainbow trout.

Bentz took some photos of the fish and measured it, recording a length of 33 inches and a girth of 19 ½ inches. “I had a really accurate handheld scale with me, and it weighed it as 14 pounds, 12 ounces, which just blew my mind,” he said. So, he put the fish on ice in his cooler and started driving home. When he realized the fish was a new state record, he stopped at the Stokesville Market in Mt. Solon to weigh it on their certified scale and have a Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) employee verify it. The next day, he took the fish to the Verona DWR office for official inspection and to fill out the record application.

Bentz plans to get a replica of the fish made, and he did filet and cook the big rainbow. “I know a lot of people don’t approve of that, but in this stream, depending on weather conditions during the summer, the water levels really get low and the water warms up, so the odds of survival for big trout are pretty slim,” he said. “I did eat this fish after it was weighed and recorded. There’s this misconception that large trout don’t taste good, but I find they do. This one had crimson filets that looked like a salmon and tasted great.”