AZGFD Excerpts - Mid-June Report

Tip Of The Week

If you are in Apache County, don't ignore Nelson Reservoir. It's often ignored by anglers zooming to Luna, Big Lake and beyond, but it's a decent late-spring rainbow producer. It even has some crappie.

And of course, Big Lake is providing some of the best fishing in the state for wild-like rainbows, cuts and brookies.

The Reel Deal

Trout Hot Spots

Luna Lake: This 27-inch, 7.5-pound rainbow trout was recently caught. The lake has more large holdover trout. Thanks to The Friends of Luna Lake out of Alpine for helping us keep this a viable fishery.

Ashurst Lake: We just received a couple angler reports of stockers and a holdover being caught.

Nelson Reservoir: Fishing is excellent. It was stocked heavily in early and mid-June. Fish in the clearer water at the upper end.

Lower Lake Mary: According to our wildlife managers, working the lake this past weekend, bait fishing was good to excellent on yellow garlic PowerBait.

Brookie And Carp Entries For Big Fish Of The Year

Congrats to Trevor Dugan, who caught this 11-pound, 7.36-pound common carp caught June 2 out of Papago Pond No. 3. (Papago Park is a Community Fishing Program pond in Phoenix.)

Rob Gerlak fly-fished on April 9 for this gorgeous, 15-inch brook trout taken from Perkins Tank, located near Flagstaff.

Arizona World-Record Redear Sunfish

Our world record redear sunfish caught by Hector Brito last year is still making some Texas anglers drool. It continues to grab headlines - in the Big Star State.

Billy Kinder of Big Billy Kinder Outdoors radio in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area said that the picture of Brito's 5.80-pound redear taken from Lake Havasu was just shared on the station's Facebook page.

"Everybody went nuts over it," Kinder said.

Kinder said he plans on interviewing Brito about his catch and, of course, visiting Lake Havasu to nab a tasty redear slab of his own. Redear at Havasu are in full spawn. Anglers are catching many 3-4 pounders in deeper water (25 feet) but higher numbers of the sunfish are in shallower water.

The world record redear picture was originally posted in Feb. of 2014, on the "T-Bone Outdoors with Travis Turner" Facebook page. To date, it has received 18,176 "likes," 96,602 "shares" and 2,460 comments.

In other words, they like it.

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