If there’s ever been a year to prove that Idaho is a record-fish state, this is it.

Eleven new state records in just six months, ranging from an 8-inch sunfish to a 49-inch northern pike to a 20-pound trout, caught by anglers from age 5 to well into adulthood, on waters scattered from the Panhandle to the high desert to the mountains near Moore.

Big fish, tiny fish, kids, retirees, out-of-state visitors chasing a bucket-list catch — if 2026 has proven anything, it’s that if you want a shot at a record, Idaho’s the place to be.

Start with the most recent, because it might be the best story of the bunch. On June 25 at Crane Falls Reservoir, 8-year-old Quinn Rodriguez and her 5-year-old sister Skye were doing what they do every summer — chasing bluegill, largemouth bass and their favorite fish of all, the electric-blue-and-orange pumpkinseed sunfish. When the biggest panfish of the day struck, their dad, outdoors writer Jordan Rodriguez, spotted a telltale red mark on its earflap as it fought toward a patch of weeds — a sign this was no ordinary bluegill.

“Girls! Hurry, get him in the boat!” he shouted. With Skye working the reel and Quinn on net duty, the Meridian sisters landed a chunky 9 1/8-inch fish unlike any pumpkinseed they’d caught before. Idaho Fish and Game later confirmed it was a pumpkinseed-bluegill hybrid and in a delightful twist, agreed to let both girls share the new state record. Rodriguez chronicled the whole adventure — the sight-fishing, the panicked shout, s’mores by the campfire afterward — on his outdoors site, TightLines208.com. Some catches, he wrote, feel like they were written in the stars.

Five days before that, high in the mountains near Moore, angler Wade Jensen was chasing every alpine fisherman’s white whale — the Arctic grayling, a strange and beautiful fish that looks like it descended from a mountain whitefish and a sailfish. While stripping a fly across Fishpole Lake on June 20, Jensen saw a gulp at the surface, set the hook, and landed a 16.7-inch grayling, enough to claim Idaho’s new catch-and-release state record.

Arctic grayling aren’t native to Idaho, but they’ve been stocked in high-elevation alpine lakes for generations, giving backcountry anglers willing to make the hike a shot at one of the state’s most coveted catches.

A week before that, records don’t get much closer than what Post Falls angler Timothy Hicks pulled off on Lake Pend Oreille. On June 13, Hicks landed a 49.75-inch northern pike, narrowly beating out the previous catch-and-release record — set by Scott Blahnik back in 2020 — by a mere three-quarters of an inch. In the record books, close enough still counts as first.

Not every record needs to be a giant, though. Just days earlier, on June 8, young angler Akeley Fahnholz wasn’t fishing for history when she felt a tug on her line along the Salmon River near the town of Salmon. What she reeled in was an 11.25-inch chiselmouth — a fish so unassuming most anglers wouldn’t look at it twice, and so rarely recorded that it doesn’t often make the books at all.

Chiselmouths are Idaho’s only member of their taxonomic order, native minnows that scrape algae and tiny insects directly off river rocks with a specially shaped mouth built for exactly that job. Growing past 11 inches on a diet of scraped-off algae takes patience most fish — and most fishermen — don’t have. Akeley’s fish is proof that sometimes the best fish story isn’t about the biggest catch of the day, but the most unexpected one.

Also in June, Luke Anderson quietly added his own name to the books — and told a bigger story in the process. His 13.6-inch Westslope cutthroat trout is, on paper, not all that impressive. Idaho’s catch-and-release cutthroat record, caught in Lake Pend Oreille, measured a full 27 inches. But Anderson’s fish claimed the state’s certified-weight record for Westslope cutthroat, a category that’s only existed since Fish and Game overhauled its record program in 2016 to give each of Idaho’s four native cutthroat subspecies — Westslope, Bonneville, Yellowstone and Lahontan — their own place in the books.

Anderson’s record fish is really a story about conservation success. Decades of overfishing, habitat loss and competition from stocked non-native trout pushed Westslope cutthroat into serious decline by the 1960s, but restrictive fishing regulations, landmark environmental laws and habitat restoration work have helped the species reclaim roughly 80% of its historic Idaho range.

Prior to Anderson’s record catch came what might be the wildest fish story of the summer. On May 30, Caroline Langdale came to Idaho’s South Fork of the Snake River from Georgia hoping for a good day of fishing. She left with one of the rarest catches in the river’s recorded history. Her indicator dipped, she assumed she’d snagged bottom, and 10 minutes later a 30.5-inch brown trout surfaced.

Here’s how rare that is: Fish and Game has recorded measurements on more than 57,600 brown trout in the South Fork dating back to 1986. Exactly four have ever topped 30 inches. That’s a 0.007% club and Langdale just joined it on a fly rod.

“I never dreamed when I started my day of fishing... that God was going to bless me with a fish of a lifetime,” Langdale said. Even 25-inch browns are scarce on the South Fork — only 30 have ever been documented in electrofishing surveys — which makes Langdale’s fish, in the words of Fish and Game’s Sportfishing Coordinator Martin Koenig, about as extraordinary as it gets.

A few weeks earlier, Idaho’s most prolific record-chaser struck again. Eagle angler Jon Urban — who’s spent years hunting down blank pages in the state’s record books, previously bagging records for black crappie and Lahontan cutthroat trout — landed an 8-inch warmouth at Cove Arm Reservoir on May 5. It surpassed the previous record of 7.5 inches by exactly half an inch, the minimum needed to count. And whose record did he break? His own son’s. Tyler Urban set that mark back in 2021 at nearby CJ Strike Reservoir. Warmouth aren’t native to Idaho and rarely thrive in the state’s colder waters, making an 8-inch specimen a genuine trophy — and making this one, fittingly, a family affair.

Go back a few more days, to May 2, and you’ll find Dylan Smith doing something he’s made a habit of. The Idaho Falls angler pulled a jaw-dropping 43.25-inch lake trout out of Payette Lake — smashing the previous catch-and-release record by more than an inch. It wasn’t even his first rodeo: Smith briefly held the same record back in 2018 before another angler, Aaron Goettsche, caught one even bigger.

Three trophy-class lake trout, two anglers, one lake — and Smith is back on top. Payette Lake’s lake trout fishery has become one of Idaho’s best in large part thanks to years of active management by Fish and Game’s McCall staff, and if you want a shot at your own record, the agency’s advice is simple: fish deep — 35 to 80 feet — near drop-offs and boulder piles, and troll or jig something that looks like a kokanee.

Go back further still, to March 19, and you’ll find a record set under a headlamp on the Kootenai River. Troy angler Caleb Wilson hooked into a 26.75-inch burbot that night — North America’s only freshwater cod species and one of Idaho’s strangest fish, with a mottled, leopard-like skin that’s earned it the nickname “Kootenai leopard.”

Burbot are nocturnal hunters that spend their days lurking in deep, slow pools before ambushing crayfish and small fish after dark, which is exactly why Wilson was out there after sundown in the first place. Decades of conservation work between Fish and Game, the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, British Columbia officials and the University of Idaho have helped the Kootenai’s burbot population rebound — and Wilson’s record catch is proof the comeback is working.

But to find where this record-shattering season really began, you have to go back even further — all the way to the season’s first two records, set less than a month apart in the dead of winter.

On Feb. 1, one of Coeur d’Alene angler Kyle Hatrock’s fishing buddies witnessed something he’d never forget.

“That’s the biggest freaking cutty I’ve ever seen!”

That’s what the friend blurted out the moment a 27-inch Westslope cutthroat trout hit the net on Lake Pend Oreille — and he wasn’t exaggerating. Hatrock’s catch rewrote Idaho’s record books for what turned out to be the second time in a month.

The first came three weeks earlier, on Jan. 13, while most Idaho anglers had their tape measures out to check ice thickness. Todd Phillips of Fruitland was fishing Dworshak Reservoir near Orofino when his rod tip bent violently toward the water. Several minutes later, he’d landed a rainbow trout the size of a Chinook salmon — 20.03 pounds, enough to claim the state’s certified-weight record by a razor-thin margin of just 0.03 pounds over the previous mark.

Any angler will tell you a rainbow trout that takes two hands to hold up is a highlight-reel fish on its own. This one made the record books — and, as it turned out, kicked off one of the wildest stretches in the history of Idaho’s record fish program.

Eleven records. Eleven species. One incredible season. From a January giant rainbow to a nighttime burbot to a chiselmouth barely bigger than a dinner plate to two little sisters sharing a trophy, this year’s record run is a reminder that Idaho’s waters still have surprises left to give — whether you’re chasing a 20-pound trout or just happen to be in the right spot when something extraordinary bites.

Think you’ve got what it takes to add your name to the list? Idaho Fish and Game’s state record fish web page, https://idfg.idaho.gov/fish/record, has everything you need to get started.

And with a season like this one, grab a rod — you never know who the next record-shattering angler will be.