It was late in the afternoon on Jan. 23, and the Wyman family and friends had been ice fishing for much of that cold and snowy day. Several anglers in their party were working the ice on 75,500-acre Moosehead Lake in Northwest Maine’s Piscataquis County.
“We were in a cabin near the lake shore sitting by the fire and watching our ice-fishing tip-ups to show if a fish took one of our shiner minnows,” Jada Wyman told Wired2fish. “It was the end of the day — and plenty cold — when we went out to pull up our tip-ups and head for home.”
Fighting an Unseen Fish
Wyman reached into one of her fishing holes through three-foot-thick ice to pull her braided line.
“The tip-up had not gone off, and the reel was frozen when I reached in to get it up,” said the 19-year-old waitress from Abbot, a town located about 50 miles from the lake. “The line wasn’t coming off the reel. But when I grabbed it and worked it out of the frozen-over hole, something pulled back and I had a fish.”
She pulled and tugged on the line, battling a strong, unseen fish for about 15 minutes.
“I was handlining the fish, and my brother Clarence was reeling the line back onto the tip-up reel,” said Wyman. “I don’t know how we didn’t lose it with the reel frozen, but I eventually got it to the hole. When I started pulling it up, it began spinning and made a whirlpool in the water that sucked it back down into the lake, and it took off strong again, pulling line.”
A Personal Record
She played the fish again via handlining, and eventually brought it to the surface.
“I’ve caught other fish over the five years of ice fishing I’ve done,” Wyman explained. “But this was the biggest one I’ve ever caught.”
The brook trout she caught was ultra-bright colored, with white-tip fins and a crimson belly. It measured 24-inches long and weighed an impressive 5-pounds, 1.5-ounces.
Wyman’s trout is well shy of the state record 9-pound, 2-ounce brook trout that Patrick Coan caught in 2010. But by any measure, her brightly hued five-pounder is a giant brookie: Officials like the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimate that brook trout average 6 to 15 inches in length and typically weigh less than Wyman’s trout.
The Spoils of Victory
“We cleaned the fish and ate it, and it fed our whole family with some left over,” Wyman said about her new personal-best catch.
And that behemoth brookie will live on as more than a memory of a hard-won battle and tasty meal.
“I’m also going to have a replica mount made of the fish,” said Wyman. “It was so beautiful and it’s the biggest fish I’ve ever caught.”
