The real 10-pounder, photographed in 1966, caught at the Metolius River inflow to Lake Billy Chinook.

To the Editor:

I want all you fisherpersons that may have read last week’s commentary “Bull trout – Once king of pristine waters” to know that I’ve been fishing and BSing long enough to realize that I can’t show you a picture of a three-pound bull trout and convince anyone it weighed 10 pounds. I know that a fish has got to weigh at least six pounds and be held way out towards the camera to come anywhere near passing for 10 pounds.

So to those of you who’ve been thinking you caught me in a “big one,” you need to know that the Blue Mountain Eagle used the wrong caption with that picture. The caption under that photograph should have read, “Caught at the headwaters of the John Day River, 1986. At 21 inches, this is a big bull trout for this locality. (For perspective, Steele is 6-foot-9.)”

I originally submitted two pictures. The bull trout looked distinctively different with considerably more spotting on the John Day drainage fish than on the larger fish from the Metolius drainage. I suspect that the larger fish in Central Oregon were anadromous (sea-going) before the dams went in on the Deschutes River. That’s strictly my own speculation.

This newspaper once ran a photograph in the 1960s of Joe West and me holding up five bull trout that my father, Ebb Steele, had caught on Lake Billy Chinook in Central Oregon, the largest weighing 15 pounds.

Terry Steele

Ritter