Brett Baldwin, 25, left his home in Smethport, Pennsylvania, long before dawn on Jan. 31. He and his buddy Anthony Sprague headed to a favorite ice fishing spot at the north end of the 12,000-acre Allegheny Reservoir, just south of the New York state border.
“We got there about 5 a.m., a place where we’d done well for walleyes and pike,” Baldwin told Wired2fish. “We drilled ice holes and each placed five tip-up fishing rigs with flags scattered around an under-ice point that slow-tapered from 6 to 15 feet deep.”
Early Action
The temperature was 0 degrees at dawn, said Baldwin, but the action was fast and furious starting at 7 a.m. Many of the fish were small walleyes, but there were some good fish, too.
Then, at 9:30 a.m., an unexpected toothy predator arrived.
“I had a line of several tip-up flags go off, and I was checking one after the other,” said Baldwin, a Home Depot store manager. “I got to the fourth tip up and the reel below the flag wasn’t spinning. I grabbed the 30-pound braided line [tied to a 10-pound test fluorocarbon leader] and set the hook.”
But whatever Baldwin set the hook in didn’t budge. He thought maybe it was fouled in brush or stumps. Pulling hard on the line, Baldwin tried to break the bait and hook free from the snag.
“Right then, the fish ran with tremendous power,” Baldwin explained. “It was the heaviest fish I’ve ever felt, and I knew I needed help so started yelling for Anthony to come over.”
Sprague was checking his tip-ups and was a good distance from Baldwin when he saw him motioning for help. It took a few minutes for Sprague to get to Baldwin. Deep snow on the lake’s 10 inches of ice made for a tough trek.
A Formidable Fighter
“When Anthony got to me, I told him the fish was huge, maybe a state-record northern pike or giant muskie because it was like nothing I’d ever felt before,” said Baldwin. “I finally got the fish up to the hole and we could see it down below that it was a huge muskie. We both start freaking out.
“It was so huge I was really worried about losing it — like having buck fever, but about a big fish, not a deer.”
Baldwin battled the muskie for several long minutes. Get got it close to the eight-inch diameter hole in the ice a half-dozen times. But each time, the fish took off on a run away from the hole. Sprague had removed his heavy coat in the frigid weather and plunged his arm deep down the hole to grab the muskie each time it came near. But it always surged away whenever he touched it.
The fish fight lasted 15 minutes before the muskie began to tire. Sprague drove his arm deep down the ice hole again. This time, he grabbed the fish by the gill plate to haul it up. Baldwin grabbed the fish, too.
“We kept pulling the fish out of the hole, and we kept pulling and pulling, like it never would come out of the hole because the muskie was so long,” said Baldwin. “We got it up and saw how huge it was, and we started yelling and high fiving, like two kids with their first fish.”
A Catch to Remember
They quickly measured the muskie at 52 inches long, with a 25-inch girth. It wasn’t weighed because they wanted to release it right away so as not to injure the prized catch. Baldwin estimates the muskie at 45 to 50 pounds, saying it was heavy and fat, possibly from spawn inside it.
Then the anglers released the muskie headfirst back through the hole and into the lake, where it swam strongly away.
Baldwin plans to have a replica mount made of his huge muskie and is currently looking for a good taxidermist to do the job.
“If I don’t catch another fish all ice season, I don’t care,” he said. “That giant of a muskie is all I’ll ever need.”
