Benjamin Ferguson from Lowville, New York, and his fishing pal Shawn Widrick of Croghan, New York, are old hands at wilderness camping, canoeing and fishing in the wilds of the Adirondacks, located in the mountainous northeast part of the state.
For the three-day July 4 weekend, they hiked into the Adirondack’s remote St. Regis Canoe Area in search of trout. They each toted about 60 pounds of camping and fishing gear. They each also hauled a lightweight 10-foot-long, 17-pound “Hornbeck” carbon-fiber canoe to a pond they asked to be unnamed.
“We trolled spoons behind our single person canoes, using paddle power to move us along slowly,” Ferguson tells Wired2fish. “It’s an old traditional method of fishing for Adirondack’s trout anglers. Often fishermen tie a streamer fly onto a ‘Lake Clear Wabbler’ spoon, which gives the fly action when trolled. But that day I had an earthworm on a hook trailing the spoon instead of a fly.”
They used light spinning tackle spooled with 6-pound-test line in the deep and very clear mountain pond.
Fishing was slow for the two anglers until July 5, when late in the afternoon Ferguson caught a feisty, bright-colored brook trout. The fish was about 2.5 pounds, he says. After admiring the unique markings and bright white-tipped fins of the clear-water-loving brookie, they released it.
They headed back toward camp late that afternoon, paddle-trolling their spoons behind their canoes. That’s when Ferguson heard his spinning rod shake and rattle against the canoe. He grabbed it and set the hook.
“It was a pretty wild fight that lasted maybe 4 or 5 minutes, but felt much longer,” said Ferguson, age 32, who works as a mill supervisor. “The fish never jumped but rolled and broke the surface several times. I only had a small net and didn’t know if it would fit in it. I missed netting the fish twice. On my third try with the net I used a real quick motion and scooped into my canoe.
“As soon as I got it in, I yelled to Shawn. We put it on a hand weigh scale and it went over 6 pounds, which I knew was the record.”
The anglers paddled back to camp. There they kept the fish reasonably fresh in pond water they put inside one of their canoes. The next day they broke camp, packed up all their gear. Ferguson wrapped his big brook trout in wet ferns, then wrapped it in a shirt for the long hike back to their vehicle.
They hiked most of the day to get out by that afternoon. Then they drove to Red Barn Meats in the town of Croghan where on certified scales the trout weighed 6 pounds, 3 ounces. It measured 22 inches long, with a 16.25-inch girth.
“A state biologist in Brownsville inspected my trout and made sure it wasn’t a splake,” said Ferguson. “It is a female brook trout, and I’ve been notified by New York’s fisheries staff that my catch is a state record.”
Ferguson’s fish tops the old state brook trout record of 6-pounds, caught by Richard Beauchamp from Silver Lake in Hamilton County in May 2013.
“I’m going to have a taxidermist make a true skin mount of my fish,” Ferguson says. “But there are lots of other Adirondack ponds that I still want to check out and fish. There might be even bigger brook trout in one of them.”
