Tom Payne and three close pals had been fishing the lakes and ponds near the town of Liberty, Maine for several early August days. They’d caught some bass and landlocked salmon during their twice annual trip to the area but were looking for a big largemouth bass.
“I had to leave for home that August afternoon, so it was my last morning of fishing,” Payne tells Wired2fish. “I got up at dawn with my pal Dave Ulrichs and we headed out with my Lund boat to fish Stevens Pond.”
The anglers launched their boat and started casting for bass. They caught some fish, but no big bass as they’d hoped for.
“There’s a deep channel that feeds into the pond that’s lined with lily pads along its banks,” said Payne, 55, a digital marketing professional from Westborough, Massachusetts. “I said to Dave, let’s try it and go ‘froggin’ there.”
The anglers headed to the feeder channel and started casting soft plastic frog poppers along the outside edges of the pads. They used spinning gear and 8-pound test line. It wasn’t long before something big clobbered Payne’s dark green popping frog.
“The fish just rolled on the frog and crushed it,” said Payne. “It tangled in the tough lily pad stems and we moved our boat to it. When we got close Dave netted it and put in my boat.
“It was huge – easily the biggest bass of my life, and a new record for our group of fishermen at the cottage.
“We were hooping and hollering, jumping up and down, yelling like a couple college kids at a football game.”
They put the fish on a digital hand scale and it showed Payne’s bass weighed a hefty 7 pounds.
He decided right then to have the bass mounted and then hung on the wall of the cottage the anglers have been visiting as a fishing group for 25 years.
“We come up every spring for smallmouth bass, and in the late summer for largemouths,” Payne explained. “We catch landlocked salmon, too, and we mount the biggest fish we’ve caught over the years and hang them in the cottage.”
Payne says that Dave Ulrichs, from Ashville, N.C. had caught a huge 4-pound, 14-ounce landlocked salmon earlier in their trip. It’s the biggest salmon anyone has caught fishing from the group’s cabin headquarters in 40 years.
“We had Dave’s salmon in the freezer for later mounting for the cabin,” Payne added. “Then I caught my bass, so we had two new record fish for our group of guys,”
Payne says the foursome of anglers have been buddies since grade school and high school, and they all show twice annually for their men’s Maine fishing jaunt.
In addition to Payne and Ulrich, their group includes New Jersey’s Mike Vencel (who owns the Maine cottage), and Tim Rich of Burlington, Vermont.
“We’ve stayed in touch with each other for a lot of years, and our twice annual Maine fishing trips are something we all look forward to,” Payne said. “That last August trip was very special, with the biggest salmon and largemouth bass that any of us have ever seen.”
