It was a couple of months ago when I blogged about our first angler to complete the new Trout Slam, First Trout Slam Completed. Let me catch you up on where we are now:
We have had four more anglers complete the Trout Slam, Timothy Engelland from Alliance, and his wife Roxanne, Chris Nelson from Gering and Donald Elliott from Fremont. Congratulations to all, and yes, we finally got the hat pins and certificates, they will be coming in the mail!
I can tell you that the fish those five anglers caught to complete their Trout Slam have all come from panhandle waters, White River, Ninemile Creek, Soldier Creek, Grabel Ponds, Carter P. Johnson have all been listed on their application forms. I can also tell you that many of the fish caught by our first five Trout Slam recipients have been taken on the fly rod, and best of all, every one of those fish caught by those five anglers, expect one put & take rainbow, have been RELEASED! Yes, those fish are still swimming for someone else to catch! Thank you!
We have received about 120 Trout Slam entries so far from about sixty different anglers. Cutthroat trout, as we all knew beforehand, have been the hardest to find; we have had fifteen cutties entered so far. However, surprisingly, there have only been sixteen brook trout entered so far.
The cutthroats may not be easy to come by, but they are out there, and know this–we have more cutthroats in the state fish hatchery system right now, they are growing and eventually there will be more cutties stocked. As I always say, “stay tuned”.
I believe I have glanced at every entry that has come in so far. Naturally, there are a few errors in the entries, mostly from mistakes in typing, filling in the wrong blanks, etc., but almost every entry I have seen so far has correctly identified the species of trout. A couple of exceptions have been tiger trout that were entered as another species. For simplicity, we are not recognizing the hybrid tiger trout for our Nebraska Trout Slam, only the four pure species, brook, brown, cutthroat and rainbow.
I have also seen some good pictures of some purdy fish! Of course that is part of the reason we like to catch trout–they are beautiful fish!
Check out the cutthroat that Donald Elliott caught:
And yes, there have been some really nice/big fish that have caught my eye. This rainbow was caught & released by Bryant Meadows:
This big brownie by Elijah Simmons was also caught & released:
I am off to a slow start on my pursuit of the Trout Slam; dried off a brown trout from Long Pine Creek several weeks ago.
Spent some time on some rainbow water later, but did not have enough time to figure out the fish that day. It is all good, they will come and it is only a matter of time.
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