At dusk on January 31, young Mason Magee was working a heavy 1-ounce blue-glow tube jig through the ice on sprawling 1,900 square mile Lake Nipigon in southwest Ontario, Canada. He was with a group of family and friends who’d been fishing and catching whitefish and small burbot on a reef far from shore over 18-inches of ice in 40 feet of water.
“The burbot fishing usually is best at night, and Mason was working his jig near the bottom using a spinning rod and 20-pound test Power Pro braided line,” Chris Magee tells Wired2fish about his son Mason’s catch. “The fish hit, Mason set the hook, and it was a pretty tough fight, though it didn’t last too long.”
The big, deep burbot was strong enough to take line off Mason’s reel against his drag. But eventually he fought and brought the fish to the surface where the Nipigon high school Lacrosse-playing freshman was able to pull it through the hole and onto lake ice.
The fish was a giant, and family and friends with Mason knew they had to get it weighed on certified scales for it to be a potential Ontario provincial record burbot. They soon left on their snow machine back to Nipigon where the fish was officially weighed on a butcher shop’s certified scales and measured.
Mason’s fish weighed 23.04 pounds, with a 40-inch length and a 23.5-inch girth. This tops the previous Ontario record burbot of 17.95 pounds caught in 2017 from Lake Simcoe by angler Sebastien Roy.
Mason’s burbot has been approved by Ontario as a new record for the species. His fish also was just shy of the International Game Fish Association’s world record burbot caught in Saskatchewan in 2010 that weighed 25-pounds, 2 ounces by angler Sean Konrad.
Burbot are a cold-water fish that prefer deep water, sometimes to 700 feet. They’re common throughout Canada and the northern parts of the U.S. and Europe.
The Magee family knows that catching an Ontario record fish is perhaps a one-time event, and they plan to have a taxidermist make a replica mount of Mason’s fish.
“We’re looking for just the right taxidermist who can do a great job with Mason’s fish, including painting it so it looks lifelike,” said Chris Magee. “We’re going to hang his fish mount in our home’s rec room where we have other fish hanging.”
