Last night, I decided to try my hand at salmon trolling for the first time this year. Took my buddy Bruce along. We fished from 6 to 9:45, south of Escanaba. We hardly marked anything, and never had a bump. We decided to pull lines at 9:45. We were in the process of bringing in the second dipsey, when one of the leadcores gets hit. It was on my side, so I reeled it in. It didn't fight like a salmon, and when we saw it wallowing behind the boat on the surface, we could see it was a dark greenish/brown. The only thing I could think of was it's a big old channel cat. After it made a couple runs behind the boat, and I got it closer, we realized it was actually a pretty good sized splake! After Bruce netted it and plopped it on the deck, our eyes about popped out of our heads! I've never seen a bigger splake! After we calmed down a bit, and put her on the measuring board, she came in at 30 inches. I've caught one that was longer (32 inches,) but that fish was no where near as fat as this one.
Brought her home and showed my folks and Diane before weighing it. I told her that if it weighed more than 13 pounds, I'd get it mounted. Less than that, and I'd probably cut her up. Brought it over to Elmer's to have it weighed on their meat scale, and it went 12.89 pounds. Bummer, I wanted her to be a true "teener." Then the guy running the scale notices her head was resting off the scale, on a piece of metal. When we got her all the way on the scale, she went 13.01 pounds! Looks like she's going on the wall!
For what it's worth, I caught it on a 7 color leadcore pulling a magnum Warrior spoon (Sister Sledge,) in about 65 FOW, East of Portage Point.
