The Trout of Titicaca

Manhattan's Abercrombie & Fitch, which outfits some of the world's best fishermen, is telling some of its well-heeled clients about a fabulous new South American fishing hole. The place: Lake Titicaca, the world's highest (12,500 ft.) navigable lake, on the border between Bolivia and Peru.

Until recently, only Andean Indians fished in Titicaca's icy waters, supplementing their meager diet by scooping up the lake's teeming, sardine-sized boga with small hand nets. Then Lieut. Colonel Howard O. Moores Jr., of the U.S. Air Force mission in La Paz, stopped by Titicaca during an Andean fishing trip. He unpacked his gear, assembled his rod and cast out into the lake. Recalls Moores: "As soon as the bait hit the water, the biggest fish I've ever had on a line hit it like a hungry dog grabbing a T-bone steak. I held on maybe five seconds, and he straightened the hook."

Moores quickly unloaded a rubber raft, paddled out into the lake and started fishing in earnest. Says he: "I made five casts and I hooked five trout, none of which could have weighed less than eight pounds. There's no other place in the world you can do that. Of the five, I boated three. The biggest was a 25-pounder and the smallest was twelve. And I got them all in just over an hour. I sat there looking at those beautiful big trout and thinking of all the years I've spent boasting about an eight-pounder I once caught in Colorado."

When fellow members of the La Paz Hunting & Fishing Club heard of Moores's catch, they remembered that Titicaca had been seeded with rainbow back in 1935, and that various tributary streams had been stocked off & on since then by the government. So far only 50 anglers have tried their luck in the lake since Moores's discovery. But they have been pulling out whoppers right & left.

A rank amateur, Donald V. Applegate of Cochabamba, caught a 17-pounder; the current record is held by Ricardo Roberts, manager of the newspaper La Razon, who boated a 32-pound rainbow.* Packing up to transfer to a new post in the Pentagon last week, Moores vowed: "I'll be back next year. If there's not a 40-pounder there now, there'll sure be by then, and that's the boy I'm after."

* World's rainbow record: a 37-pounder caught at Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, in 1947.

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