Glendale Man Catches New State Record Rainbow Trout

Jose M. DeLeon of Glendale was fishing with a live night crawler and thought he had hooked onto a log or something at Woods Canyon Lake on Sept. 8. What he had really hooked was a new state record rainbow trout weighing 13 pounds, 6.4 ounces and measuring 31 inches long.

DeLeon almost didn’t get the huge rainbow landed. “It broke my line and I jumped in the water with the net, but it was too big, I couldn’t get it in the net. I kind of just grabbed it and hauled it ashore,” he said.

DeLeon took the huge rainbow trout up to the Woods Canyon Lake Store to show them what he had caught. “They got more excited than I was and said, ‘You probably caught the state record.’”

They were right.

The trout was weighed on certified scales at the store. Then DeLeon brought his proud new record to the Game and Fish headquarters in Phoenix late Thursday afternoon, where biologists confirmed that he had caught a new state record rainbow trout.

DeLeon’s rainbow toppled the previous state record of 12 pounds, 5.76 ounces and 32.5 inches long set by Brandon Childs of Gilbert with a fish he caught from Tempe Town Lake on Dec. 28, 2002.

Roger Sorensen, a Game and Fish biologist, said the new state record is terrific news, adding, “There are still large trout out there waiting to be caught, and this is the time of year to catch them.”