A little boy caught a very big fish Monday on the Fraser River.
Kegan Rothman, who is nine years old and was in B.C. on a fishing trip with his dad Dan Rothman, is four feet, or 1.2 metres, tall.
The great white sturgeon he landed near Chilliwack, with help from his father and guide Ben Trainer of Great River Fishing Adventures, measured just over three metres in length. Its girth, as measured around the pectoral fins, was 1.27 metres.
While it couldn’t be weighed before being released, as is the rule under B.C.’s catch-and-release program for sturgeon, Kegan’s catch was estimated to weigh 272 kilograms and to be about 75 years old.
Despite his youth, Kegan, a New Jersey resident who came to B.C. specifically for sturgeon, is an avid fisherman who records the weights and sizes of all his catches.
The sturgeon dwarfs his previous biggest fish, a still-notable 54.4-kg sailfish caught in Mexico.
Kegan’s sturgeon was the biggest landed by Great River this year, although the company has helped land four monster-sized sturgeon during tours. The largest catch was 3.75 metres long and weighed 498.9 kg.
“I’ve been a professional fishing guide on the Fraser for 11 years and have fished these rivers my whole life,” Trainer said in a press release. “This is one of my largest fish I have helped a client catch.
“We have helped to collectively tag more than 61,000 white sturgeon since 1995, and scanned an excess of 122,000 tagged sturgeon, which have been caught and released,” he said.
Despite the numbers, sturgeon are a protected species in B.C., which is why there is catch-and-release requirement, along with tagging.
None of that was critical for Kegan.
“It’s the most excitement I’ve ever had with a fish,” the press release quoted him as saying. “It was so hard to hold on to the rod.
“I thought the fish was going to pull me into the water,” he said of a battle that lasted an hour and 45 minutes. “I’ll never forget this — this is the best trip of my life!”
The Rothmans were planning to be back on the water Thursday and to fly home Friday to New Jersey — with a fantastic fish story.
