A Maine angler “with a couple of hours to kill” last Thursday caught a lake trout that’s likely to shatter the 62-year-old state record.
The lake trout caught by Erik Poland at Lower Richardson Lake weighed 39.2 pounds. The state record is a 31.5-pound lake trout caught by Hollis Grindle at Beech Hill Pond in 1958.
Poland told For The Win Outdoors that he has provided catch details and a document signed by the Maine Warden Service to The Maine Sportsman, which maintains fishing records, and expects his record to be approved soon.
“I don’t see any obstacles in that process,” he said.
Poland, 34, of Andover, told the Bangor Daily News that he went fishing mainly to pass time. “I had a couple of hours to kill [so] I thought I’d fish for salmon for awhile, go for a swim, then head home.”
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When he failed to locate salmon on his sonar device, Poland dropped a DB Smelt lure 94 feet to the bottom, where he saw markings that indicated the presence of lake trout.
His first strike was by what is now the pending state-record fish, which he fought for more than an hour before realizing his net was too small.
“I walked it up to the back of the boat, looked at my 18- to 20-inch net and quickly kicked that to the side,” he told the Bangor Daily News. “It was half the size it needed to be. So I just grabbed [the fish] by the gill plate and hauled it up over the stern of the boat.”
Poland used lead-core line and a two-inch lure tied to a fluorocarbon leader with a breaking strength of only eight pounds, making the catch even more remarkable. “I can’t even dare to guess how many times it ran line out on me, and then I’d reel it back in,” he said.
He described the catch as bittersweet because going for a record meant killing the fish.
“There was a fleeting moment where I really wanted to put it back,” he said. “But ultimately, I would have been the biggest liar in the world if I had. Then it really would have just been a fish tale.”
Lake trout are found throughout most of Canada, into Alaska, and in parts of the U.S., where they were introduced. In the southern regions the fish tend to remain in cooler water at extreme depths.
The International Game Fish Assn. list as the all-tackle world record a 72-pound lake trout caught in Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northern Territories in 1995.
–Images courtesy of Erik Poland