By Jody Medford
As the old saying goes, third times a charm. It definitely applies to this story.
This made my third trip to New Zealand to try to catch a monster brown trout. My previous trip last year, I caught a twenty pounder. But I wanted one the size that I couldn’t catch in the US. I have previously caught seven twenty+ pounders in lake Michigan. My biggest was 27 lbs.
I became friends with someone who knows everything about how to fish for a big brown trout in New Zealand. He pretty much guaranteed me if I would put the hours in, I co
uld probably get a thirty pounder. He wishes to remain anonymous, so I respect that wish.
I flew over there in late May of this year. He met me at the airport and we headed to fish the canals near Twizel NZ. We started fishing immediately and in a twenty four hour period we fished about twenty hours of that time. I hooked a real big one the first day, and it jumped out of the water three times and broke my line. We were using eight pound line. The next day I hooked into a true monster. My first thirty pound brown trout. What a fight, It lasted about twenty five minutes.
The 3rd day, was the day I caught the biggest brown trout of my life. This fish hit and didn’t move. I just held my rod as it slowly pulled line out. I couldn’t move it, It felt like it was stuck on the bottom. About halfway through the fight, which lasted almost 40 minutes, it came in almost close enough for him to net the fish. Having caught numerous really big brown trout, what he told me as he went out in the water to net the fish, shocked me. He said, you may have a world record. He said, I don’t think it’s going to fit in the net. I wasn’t really nervous till that point, but then I got incredibly nervous.
So after about fifteen more minutes, trying to wear the fish down, it finally came to the bank and he was able to net it. With cell phones rolling, we captured every minute of the fish we could, from the time he netted it until we got it on the bank. We immediately contacted my wife.
We facetimed her, and we all couldn’t believe the size of this fish. What a monster, 39 inches long and the girth was 28 and 1/2 inches. We weighed the fish and it was 39+ pounds.
I was hoping to catch a thirty pound fish on this trip, and I was blown away to catch three. We caught 29 fish in 4 days. I caught another huge brown trout and several male brown trout, one in the twenty plus range. The colors on those male browns were amazing. I also caught a huge rainbow.
It was definitely the fishing trip of a lifetime. I told him, out of all my fishing trips, this one was the most amazing. New Zealand is a beautiful country, and as long as I live I will never forget my fishing trip in 2025.