Northwest Wild Country Radio Station

Check that. If she’s survived since April 11, 2007, when guide Ed Iman gently slid her back into the waters of Lake Umatilla, she’s gotten bigger. She may be pushing 26, 27 pounds now, a full 5 pounds heavier than the certified world record.

She’s become a thing of legend. A fable. She’s an urban myth that is quickly becoming the Holy Grail for walleye anglers from Washington to Wisconsin. She’s no legend, though. She’s been hooked, fought, netted, videotaped, weighed and released into the Columbia River between McNary and John Day dams.

She’s the biggest walleye ever caught on a hook and line.

This is her story:

IMAN
Ed Iman of Iman’s Sportfishing is easily one of my favorite fishing guides in the world. I’ve called him “Ed” exactly one time: the very first time I talked to him. Since then, I've known him only as “Iman”. There’s no “Ed” to anybody who knows him, and he has a buddy list that runs from one side of the globe to another.

If you live and fish in the Pacific Northwest, you’ve seen Iman quoted for 20 years in regional fishing publications and newspapers, and you’ve seen his seminars at the sportsmen’s shows. You’ve stopped and done a double take when you’ve cruised past his booth at those shows, and you've stared in utter amazement at the reproduction mounts of the massive walleye he’s caught on the Columbia.

He’s been around longer than God, it seems, a certified PNW walleye legend – if such a thing exists.

It’s appropriate, then, that on that clear April day last year, Iman’s rod was the one that buckled under the weight of a big, big, BIG fish biting on a blade bait in Lake Umatilla. Iman was filming a TV show with a Cabela's cameraman in the boat, along with longtime Washington fishing writer Terry Sheely, and it quickly became obvious that the camera was capturing something special. As Sheely later wrote in THE REEL NEWS: “In the refraction of the river water, the fish looks as wide as it is long.”

THE FISH
Sheely’s description isn’t an exaggeration. I’ve never seen a printed photo of the fish, because none exist: the images you might’ve seen in OUTDOOR LIFE or on the cover of FISHING & HUNTING NEWS are vidcaps taken from the Cabela's camera that recorded the event. Everything happened so fast when the fish was hooked, nobody had time to bring out a camera for a quick snapshot.

No matter. If you’ve seen those pixilated images of Iman’s fish, you know it was a monster.

Iman fought the fish, brought her to the net, lifted her aboard, and ripped a brand new scale from its package to weigh it. The digital readout: 11.5.

Obviously a misread. Iman and Sheely weighed her again: 11.5. As Sheely writes, Iman’s reaction was classic Iman.

“Scales don’t lie,” he said.

So, back into the water she went. No big deal, matter of fact. Just like Iman.

THE SCALE
The morning came to a screeching halt thanks to Bob Roberts, a guide who was fishing clients in the same vicinity as Iman’s boat. Roberts, it seems, had a 15-plus-pound fish on board, but no camera, and as he approached Iman’s boat, the gravity of the newly released fish started to set in.

“Hey, Iman, can you get a picture of this 15-pounder for me?” Roberts said, holding up a trophy walleye.

“You sure that’s a 15?” Iman asked.

“Yep, weighed her on my spring scale. It’s right on the money,” Roberts responded.

Roberts’ fish was much, much, much smaller than the fish Iman had released, a fact that threw Iman’s boat into a state of confusion until the Cabela's cameraman took a closer look at Iman’s digital scale.

K-I-L-O-G-R-A-M-S. The damn thing was set on metric. At 11.5 kilograms, that pencils out to 25.353 pounds.

A world record walleye, mistakenly released back into the Columbia.

THE AFTERMATH
I didn’t get to talk face-to-face with Iman until nearly 9 months after the record fish, and his attitude about it was – and still is – classic Iman.

“What am I gonna do about it, Shangle?” he asked me. “Do I get pissed off and regret it for the rest of my life? No, sorry, I don’t have it in me.”

But he DOES have one thing in him: “I know where she lives," he said, tapping his finger to his temple. "I'll find her again. She’s still out there, and I know where she lives.”

She’s out there, somewhere. All 25.3 pounds of her.

-Joel Shangle