She wasn’t fishing for a state record. She was just fishing.

But on June 8 when young angler Akeley Fahnholz of Carmen, a small Lemhi County town, felt a tug on her line along the Salmon River near the city of Salmon, she reeled in something historic: a brand-new state record chiselmouth.

At first glance, it might not have looked like much. The fish measured 11.25 inches — a number that wouldn’t turn heads next to this year’s record-breaking lake and brown trout catches making headlines across the state. But size, in this case, is exactly the point.

Chiselmouths are members of the minnow family and the only species in their taxonomic order found in Idaho. They rarely grow past 12 inches, which means Akeley’s catch is about as close to a giant as this species gets — a genuine trophy, chiselmouth-style.

And chiselmouths earn their name the hard way. Rather than chasing down prey like a trout or char, they scrape algae and tiny insects directly off river rocks with a specially shaped mouth built for the job — bite by bite, rock by rock. Growing to 11-plus inches on a diet like that takes patience most fish — and most fishermen — don’t have.

That’s part of what makes Akeley’s record so much fun: chiselmouths don’t show up in Idaho’s record books very often. Landing one, measuring up, and getting it into the books is a rare enough feat that it’s now hers, permanently, in the state’s catch-and-release record archive.

Akeley released the fish alive after documenting the catch, as required for catch-and-release records, and Idaho Fish and Game has officially certified it as the new state record.

Congratulations to Akeley Fahnholz on her new Idaho state catch-and-release record chiselmouth — proof that sometimes the best fish story isn’t about the biggest catch of the day, but the most unexpected one.