While ice fishing in Canada, Sam Boucha battled a monster lake trout for nearly an hour before realizing the hole in the ice was not big enough for the fish, so her boyfriend Brad Molloy started drilling a second hole.
In the meantime, the fish spit the hook, but Boucha managed to plunge her arm into the icy water and grab ahold of the fish, and waited for the expanded hole in the ice.
“I was frozen,” Boucha told CBC. “We had a shack to warm up in afterwards so it was nice, but, yeah, it was bare-handed, arm down the hole to my shoulder, holding on to that fish until the second hole was drilled.”
Boucha told Outdoor Life she “could barely hold it” through the 2½-foot ice hole.
Once the hole opened up, Boucha pulled it through the opening. The lake trout measured 57¾ inches with a 31-inch girth. It topped out at 50 pounds on a hand scale but was estimated to weigh 57 pounds based on a calculation from the measurements.
It was the biggest fish Boucha has ever caught.
“I’ve caught a 35-pound trout before and this was something similar, so we’re pretty excited,” she told CBC. “It was unreal.”
The fish died, so Boucha plans on mounting it and putting it in a family cabin or in her home. She donated a pectoral fin and an ocular bone to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry for research and to get the fish’s age.
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Boucha made the catch on Red Lake in the town of Red Lake, Ontario. Though some people were upset that the fish died, many commenters on social media were positive about the catch.
“[One] was from a family friend here in Red Lake and he was like, ‘You’re a fishing goddess,’” Boucha told CBC. “I like that.”
Photos courtesy of Sam Boucha.