When he hooked the fish of a lifetime, one late June day in 2023 on Montana’s famed Big Hole River, Dr. Bob Russo was taking a picture of a horse-shaped cloud galloping through that beautiful big sky. His 10-year-old granddaughter had recently become an avid sketcher of cloud animals, so Bob was doing what any thoughtful grandpa would do. The sky horse had appeared just after Bob had cast a big streamer into one of the deep pools for which the Big Hole is renowned.

Bob’s granddaughter is a pretty darn good angler in her own right!

After he snapped the photo, Bob looked down and saw his fly line slipping out of the raft behind him. He grabbed the line to pull it taut, already chagrined that the log to which he was surely hooked was unlikely to relinquish the fly that Kelly Kinzey, his guide of many years, had provided him. Sure enough, when he pulled the line tight it beelined toward a fixed point at the bottom of the pool. “I was already apologizing to Kelly for the snag when I felt the log come alive” says Bob. “Then it moved up the water column and literally stopped the boat in its tracks!”

What happened next has become the stuff of legend. “It hit the fast water behind the tank [guide speak for “deep pool”] and Bob nearly had the rod ripped out of his hands,” Kelly remembers. “She moved with us for about 400 yards of fast water, and then found another tank to bury herself in. We anchored up but we couldn’t move her at all for at least 10 minutes. Then she made another blistering downstream run and it was all I could do to get the anchor up before Bob ran out of backing.”

The monster trout’s next move has Kelly shaking his head in disbelief to this day. With the bare spool of Bob’s reel visible under the fly line backing, the fish turned in a huge eddy and immediately charged back upstream into the tank she had just vacated. “I dropped the anchor right at the same spot as before,” Kelly laughs, “and then Bob retrieved his line and went back to work. If she hadn’t made that U-turn, I’m pretty sure it would have been over.”

It should be noted here that Bob is an avid and experienced fly angler. He and a group of doctor fishing buddies – they call themselves the “Fly Fishing Physicians” – first visited the Complete Fly Fisher lodge on the Big Hole River in the late ‘70s. Though the group makes a regular practice of fishing various global locales, CFF remains one of only two lodges they visit every year. “I’ve been to at least 50 fishing lodges around the world,” says Bob, “and this one is the best. The next one isn’t even close.”

Bob has fished the Big Hole every year since 1992, a streak aided by his retirement some years ago. He had caught what he believed was the fish of his lifetime roughly 10 years prior, a barrel-chested 26” brown trout that afforded him a decade of bragging rights over his fishing physician companions. Kelly was his guide on that beast as well, and their shared experience came in handy for the battle that was now unfolding with a fish that Bob already knew beyond a doubt would make his previous best look like an average trout by comparison. If, that is, he somehow managed to land it.

By the time the behemoth brown settled back into the deep tank, the boat carrying Bob’s son, Chris, had caught up to them. Guide Max Lewis eddied out and dropped anchor, so now Bob had a cheering gallery. “Bob was really on point that day,” Kelly says. “He was listening so well, never lost his cool, just did about as good a job as you could do with a fish like that.”

Finally, the fish tired enough for a netting attempt. “Kelly tried to net it from the raft but couldn’t get enough of the net around it to pull it up,” Bob recalls. “So he jumped in the water – it’s almost neck-deep, mind you – and put the front half of the fish in the net, grabbed the tail to secure it, and walked it into shallower water. That’s when I realized what had just happened.”

“Me and Max were yelling like a couple of kids,” says Kelly. “Between us, we’ve got more than 70 years of experience on the Big Hole, and neither of us had ever seen anything like it!”

“It” was a massive female brown trout that taped 32” by Max’s hand. That’s an insanely large trout by any standard, and almost unheard of in a freestone river. Based on photos, a fisheries biologist acquaintance of Bob’s estimated the weight of that girthy gal to be between 17-19 lbs, and her age at 8 or 9 years old. “He said that her dark color likely meant she was past spawning age,” adds Bob.

Suffice it to say, Bob’s bragging-rights streak is destined to remain intact until the group’s eventual dissolution (for his part, Bob says he’ll likely continue fishing the Big Hole with CFF until he shuffles off this mortal coil), or perhaps even longer. “When they make my gravestone,” he chuckles, “I want that fish on it!”

One thing’s for sure: whether it’s on granite, on the wall at the Complete Fly Fisher (where a replica hangs), or in the memory of all involved and all who have heard and will yet hear the tale – the legend of this particular “fish of a lifetime” will echo for generations to come.

A Sky Horse and the Fish of a Lifetime.