SKOWHEGAN — Lila Ware can’t wait to show you the calendar. She opens it to September, and there he is. Her husband, Carroll Ware, proudly displaying a record brown trout he just caught.

“Here he is, Mr. September,” Lila said, chuckling to herself.

The calendar is the won released annually by the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and Museum, in Hayward, Wisconsin. It makes sense Ware gets a month. He’s already all over the record book.

The Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame compiles a world record book each year. Ware, 73, currently holds 36 world catch and release records. At one time or another, he’s held 50 records. Ware’s copy of the latest edition is marked up with pencil, checking off records he’s held in the past, currently holds, or aspires to.

“In 2009, I realized I had 21 (records). Fifty appealed to me,” Ware said. “I’m tremendously competitive.”

The Hall of Fame determines record-setting fish by length. Because Ware’s records are in catch and release categories, a photo of the fish must be taken immediately after it’s caught. A witness must be verified (like recording a hole in one in golf). The fish is released back into the water, the photo is sent off to the Hall, and the angler waits to hear if it’s a record.

Ware’s records have been set all over the world. Many on the McKenzie River in Labrador, some on the Quinto River in Chile. Oddly enough, none in Maine.

“There are some species in Maine that are very doable, though,” Ware said.

When you set a record, the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame sends you a certificate. That’s how the record collecting started for Ware. He figured the certificates would catch the eye of perspective clients of his guide business, Fins and Furs Adventures, when he set up his booth at outdoors and trade shows. Each year, as he plans his fishing trips, Ware flips through the latest edition of the record book, checking off a few marks he thinks he’ll go for.

It’s not an obsession. Ware is adamant about that. Lila is, too.

“If he’d been obsessed with it, we’d have gone our separate ways a long time ago,” Lila said.

Every record book has that one mark that’s considered untouchable. To Ware, that’s the record brook trout caught in Ontario’s Nipigon River in 1916. That fish went 14 pounds, 8 ounces, and was 31.5 inches long. Debate has raged for more than a century as to whether the fish was a brook trout at all. Ware doesn’t expect to cross that one off his list.

“If I catch one that big, Fins and Furs will cease to exist because I will be disgustingly rich,” he said.

Last year, Ware submitted three fish to the record book. Two were accepted. There’s a guy in New Brunswick, Alan Madden. Ware and Madden have never met, but Ware noticed Madden’s name popping up in the record book more often. Is this a budding rivalry? Maybe.

“I’d love to talk to (Madden) sometime,” Ware said. “He keeps checking in brook trout.”

When Ware thinks of catching his record-setting fish, he thinks first of the little things. The wind that made a 70-foot cast a chuck and hope. The sun gleaming off the water. The people he was with. The record has to be secondary to the experience, Ware said, or you’re not experience anything.

“If catching fish is the chief focus, at the end of the day you’re missing something. Just being out there is such a privilege,” Ware said. “I think I’m blessed every time I’m on the water.”