Two National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame anglers were checking out Montana’s 3,600-acre Holter Lake on July 27. Famed fishermen Steve Pennaz and Jim Kalkofen are Minnesota natives, but now live in the Big Sky State. They’d never fished the lake previously.
“I have a new jet boat I wanted to try out, so I called Kalkofen and my long-time friend Mark Mahoney to join me on Holter,” Pennaz told Wired2fish. “We fished the first day for trout and caught a lot of rainbows from 2 to 4 pounds.
“But we really wanted some big walleyes, because Holter Lake has the state record walleye weighing over 18 pounds. I’d never been on that water before, so I was just looking and learning it as we fished it.”
The trio of anglers started probing a deep weed bed edge of Holter, a Missouri River impoundment 45 miles north of Helena.
“We got on a deep weed line and started casting, hoping for walleyes,” said Pennaz, host of television’s Lake Commandos. “We caught a few small pike, then Mark hooked a good fish. We were hoping it was a heavy walleye.
“When I first saw it, it looked as big as a sturgeon. After five or six minutes it got close to my boat and it was as big as a giant muskie.”
But it was a northern pike bigger than the Hall of Fame fisherman had ever seen, and the net they had was trout size.
“With no net I tried grabbing it several times and it ripped up both my hands pretty badly — thank goodness for liquid Band-Aids,” Pennaz explained. “I finally got ahold of it and we were shocked at how big and fat it was.
“That fish was eating pretty well in Holter. Probably chewing on trout.”
They had no scale on board their boat to weigh the massive pike. But the fish measured 48 inches in length.
“We didn’t have a tape measure either,” chuckled Pennaz. “Jim put his fishing rod alongside the pike, marked its length against his rod, and later measured it at 48 inches.”
They unhooked the Berkley white “Bonefish” jig from the huge pike and released it.
“Mark used a walleye tackle set up with 15-pound braided line and 15-pound-test fluorocarbon leader,” Pennaz stated. “Without braided line, he’d have been in trouble fighting that fish. And the jig was barbed at the right spot in the top tip of its mouth, so the leader avoided the pike’s teeth.
“My hands weren’t so lucky. Both of them got ripped up trying to grab that northern.”
Kalkofen and Pennaz have caught countless pike, and plenty of big ones. Pennaz said Mahoney’s Holter Lake fish is the biggest he’s ever seen, with an incredible girth.
The anglers believe it weighed well over 30 pounds. Formulas to estimate pike weight from length measurements verify the fish was at least 30 pounds — and with its tremendous girth, 35 pounds is a modest estimate.
The Montana record is a pike weighing 37.5 pounds, caught in 1971 by Lance Moyer from the Tongue River Reservoir.
“It was 90 degrees, no clouds or wind, and Mark catches a giant pike like that,” Pennaz said. “It shouldn’t have been a great day for fishing, but it’s one we won’t forget.”
