The biggest fish I ever caught was a brown trout in Edwards, CO, near my mother's place. The beast was well over 20 pounds. It was in a pond on the Cordillera golf course. It took me over half an hour to reel it in on a fly rod with 8 pound test line. Once I finally did get it ashore I saw that its mouth had developed grotesque protuberances which looked like spikes. It was, quite simply, an aquatic monster! I didn't have a camera on me and had no intention of trying to eat the thing, so I returned it to its native habitat, exhausted as it was from the fight.
The bookend of this little "big fish" tale is that a Mexican kid later poached the thing out of the same pond with some help from his dad. They took a picture, and his family feasted on the beast.
The photo and story ended up in the local paper. I told my mother several years later when she recalled the newspaper story and its connections to my post-catch ravings to her after I had caught it: "That's the fish I told you about!!!"
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