ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9604020007
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B12 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Outdoors
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
State officials have told Tim Sprouse the 8.45-pound fish brook trout he caught in late February just beyond the raceways of the Paint Bank Hatchery won't be recognized as a state-record brook trout.
Sprouse isn't surprised.
``I feel like from the beginning they went out of the way to disqualify the fish,'' he said.
Sprouse reported catching the trout while fishing a public stretch of tiny Paint Bank Branch, which flows from the hatchery in Craig County.
According to hatchery workers, a huge trout, kept at Paint Bank for show, had gotten stuck in a valve. The only way to save it was to release it into the branch, where Sprouse was fishing.
Officials of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries said their rejection of the trout as a record had nothing to do with it being an escapee from the hatchery, although at least one member of the record committee said he felt that alone should disqualify the fish.
As it turned out, the fish wasn't the brook trout biologists first thought it to be.
``It was a tiger trout,'' said A.L. LaRoche, a state regional fisheries manager.
The tiger trout is a hybrid, a cross between a brook trout and brown trout. Hybrids aren't recognized in the state record book.
``He caught a nice fish, but it is not a brook trout, and it is not a state record,'' LaRoche said.
Several hours after the fish was caught, a state biologist examined the fish and determined it was a brook trout. Later, when a Blacksburg taxidermist began thawing the fish for mounting, the true colors returned, LaRoche said. The markings along the back were uncharacteristic of a brook trout, and so were the vomerine teeth in the roof of its mouth, he said.
Case closed?
Not as far as Sprouse is concerned.
``If it is a tiger trout, fine, it is a tiger trout. Then I don't deserve the record,'' he said. ``But you wouldn't believe all the bull I've been through.''
Sprouse, who lives in Catawba, said he planned to send the trout out of state to have the identification checked by other ichthyologists.
``I want to take every precaution that I can to make certain there is no doubt,'' he said.
Sprouse believes some fish officials have been determined to deny him record status from the beginning, because of where the fish was caught.
``I had my fishing license. I was fishing state water. I was doing everything I was supposed to do,'' he said.
``They have dampened my whole feeling about trout fishing. I think they need to come up with a better system. There are so many possibilities and ways that you can make a mistake and lose your chance of getting a record.''
The record committee of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries is in the process of adding a rule for certifying a record. It reads: ``No fish caught within the boundaries of a public or private aquaculture facility or private fee-fishing area will be recognized as a state record.''
That would include the area Sprouse was fishing, and others like it.
``We are trying to make this program as credible as we can,'' said Ed Steinkoenig, the biologists who heads the committee.
The new rule also would prohibit a record coming from one of the growing number of pay-fishing areas where the majority of the state's large trout are being caught.
``We don't want to start targeting certain water, or eliminating people, but we have always had concerns about the potential of somebody force-feeding a fish and purposely raising it to state- or world-record status,'' Steinkoenig said.
Until now, there has been nothing to keep someone from buying a huge trout out of state, bringing it to Virginia, putting it in a pond for a couple of days, then catching it and entering it as a Virginia record, he said.
``What we don't want is a fish that has been raised in a hatchery to become a state record,'' Steinkoenig said.
``They are trying to make it so no one ever will catch a record,'' Sprouse said.
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