‘It’s what I live for.’ Fisherman breaks Tennessee Cutthroat record during fishing trip with friends

Every year, three old fishing buddies get together in North Carolina or Tennessee to fish for trout. On the afternoon of June 28, the trio launched their 14-foot johnboat with a jet outboard motor into the South Fork of the Holston River and headed upriver to the Boone Lake Dam Tailwater in northeast Tennessee.

“We wanted big trout and we knew the shallow, rocky area below the dam was a prime spot for them when the dam turbines were running, which they were,” said 45-year-old fisherman Charles Fulton. Outdoor living. “It’s a tricky spot to fish because it’s shallow and dangerous with boulders and a fast current. You have to wear life jackets most of the time.”

Fulton and his North Carolina friends, Robert Benfield and Meade Forbes, launched their boat into the fast-moving water below the dam and began casting jerk-bait plugs with spinning rods. They held their boat in the fast-moving current with the outboard motor and the trolling motor on the bow.

“We were catching a lot of big, strong fish, but we were having a hard time getting one in the boat,” said Fulton, a water manager for the city of Louisville, Mississippi. “Then I caught a nice 5-pound trout and got it in the boat. Then one of my friends caught a 7-pound rainbow trout and got it in the boat.”

The men also saw a large brown fish following a lure.

“That fish was over 15 pounds and we knew we couldn’t handle it if it struck. But it dove and disappeared.”

Then, around 4:30 p.m., Fulton cast a 5-inch jerkbait into a stretch of fast-moving water and something big hit him. He fought the fish on a 20-pound-test braided monofilament leader.

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“He was much stronger and fought harder than the trout I had caught,” he said. “He didn’t jump though and a few minutes later I got him close to the boat and Benfield scooped him up in the net. The trout wasn’t happy with his catch. He pulled the back hook out of my plug as we were putting him in the boat.”

Fulton thought his trout was a rainbow trout. But Benfield recognized the distinctive orange stripes on the underside of its lower jaw and told Fulton it was a cutthroat.

“Robbie fishes that tailrace a lot and he knew the state record was smaller,” Fulton said.

The fishermen checked that record on their phones—a 4-pound, 12-ounce trout also caught in July 2023 by 10-year-old Palmer Tipton in the Boone tailwaters—and started calling. But it was after work, and the fishermen couldn’t contact state officials about what to do with Fulton’s record-sized trout. So they kept fishing until dark.

“Once we were done fishing and got the boat out of the water, we knew we had to find a certified scale to weigh my trout,” Fulton said. “We had a hard time finding a place to weigh the fish until we got to the H&H Market in Elizabethton.”

There, on certified scales, the fish weighed 6 pounds 9 ounces — nearly two pounds heavier than the existing record. Fulton’s fish was 22 inches long with a girth of 14.75 inches.

The buddies put the fish on ice until it could be inspected by state officials. It wasn’t until July 2 that Sally Petre, a fisheries biologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, positively identified the trout as a steelhead and verified the catch as the new state record.

Cutthroat trout are not native to Tennessee. They are an import from the western state that released into several rivers in TennesseeIn 2021, 2,500 trout were stocked in the Boone Spillway, and some of those fish are now emerging.

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According to Petre and TWRA plans to build up more inventory this year. Other locations around the state could also be filled with the hard-fighting trout.

“Cutthroat trout are absolutely beautiful, and pictures of my fish just don’t do them justice,” Fulton says. “I have the trout mounted by a taxidermist. And you can bet we’ll be getting them again… Fishing is in my blood, it’s what I live for.”