'Bucket list' brown trout is one for the wall

Saturday Feb. 11 started like any other day of ice fishing. Wyatt Blevins of Missoula and his friend Morgan McKinney set out on the ice just before sunrise.

The brisk Montana morning promised a day of cold air and light breezes across the arid ice field of Seeley Lake's frozen surface. Blevins set a line and immediately caught a small pike.

"I was like 'okay, today might be alright,'" Blevins said.

The first pike was a small one and as the following hours brought more of the same their optimism was waning. With no special pike taking the bait, they decided to aim for some perch instead. Just to pass the time.

"It was slow and we were kind of just standing around," Blevins said. "Finally I was like 'oh, you know, I'll pick up that perch rod and actually do something with that.'"

Killing time with the lightweight rod proved to be just the trick.

"We were catching some perch and all of a sudden I just got hammered," Blevins said.

Something big took the bait under the ice and Blevins was pulled into a ten-minute fight against an unknown opponent. In all his time fishing on Seeley, he'd never seen a brown trout like the one he was now reeling in.

He had no idea that the once-in-a-lifetime fish was on the other end of the line.

The rod, a 30-inch Ugly Stik he only packed for catching perch, was not suited for this kind of battle. The line was pulled to its limit and the fight didn't seem to be winding down. Using a ten-pound braid with an eight-pound fluorocarbon leader, he reeled in a 32.25 inch brown trout that weighed more than 12lbs.

"It had that rod folded in half and my leader was going in and out of the bottom of the ice hole a bunch of times, and I was like 'I am not prepared for this fish,'" Blevins said.

Once the monster fish passed the hole both men knew they were chasing something bigger than either had ever pulled from the waters of Seeley Lake before. Blevins managed to line it up and grab the giant fish by the gills, hauling it up out of the 16-inch-deep hole.

"We'd never seen anything like that. I've never seen a brown trout that big, and we were both pretty speechless, man," Blevins said. "It was super awesome."

A few weeks earlier Blevins was on a Facebook group for Montana fishers. He read a discussion about where to catch large trout.

"A bunch of people said, 'Fort Peck, Fort Peck and you get some big ones out at Cooney or wherever'," Blevins said.

When the discussion turned to Seeley he was surprised.

"I have fished Seeley my whole life," Blevins said. "Every once in a while we'll catch a brown trout, but some people were saying there's some really, really big ones and so we were talking about that a couple of weeks ago."

A trophy fish deserved trophy treatment and Blevins immediately knew the beast was destined for his wall.

"I was sitting there holding it and I thought, 'I want to look at this fish forever," Blevins said. "He'll go in the living room. I got a special spot."