Back in 2009, Kyle Anderson of Rapid City, MI caught the Great Lakes muskie of a lifetime when he snagged one at 50-pounds 8-ounces in Torch Lake. After a long day of trying to get the fish weighed, it ended up beating the old record from 1984 by 2.5 pounds.
The fish was so massive that Anderson couldn’t hold it vertically on his own, so he enlisted the help of his buddy Alex Lafkas. A sea-proclaimed muskie junkie, Anderson had been going after for seven years at the time. His state record muskie was the eleventh Great Lakes muskie he had caught over 50 inches long.
The muskie was caught on a 9-inch Muskie Magnet. Anderson had upgraded the custom lure with Muskie Innovations hooks and Wolverine Triple split rings. He also trolled on a 3-foot leader of 100-pound-test Trilene Big Game mono and 50-pound-test Ultragreen Maxima line with a 6-foot 6-inch medium-heavy St. Croix Model rod and a Daiwa Sg47LCA Sealine reel.
Anderson was fishing before work when he caught the muskie, which hit at 7:50am.
“The fish hit hard. I could hardly get the rod out of the holder,” says Anderson. He was trolling with three rods when the fish ate the lure closest to boat – just 50 feet back from the prop wash.
Anderson initially tried to release the fish, but it had its gill plate torn after a hook lodged in its gills.
“I clipped the hooks off, trying everything I could to let her go,” he says. Once he knew a live release wasn’t possible, he made a phone call to get the fish weighed.
“Beside her spent eggs, the fish may have lost weight due to blood loss after being hooked, and lost water weight before being weighed,” said Nicholas Popoff, a DNR biologist.
Despite setbacks that caused the fish to lose weight and difficulty in finding a certified scale that could weigh such a heavy fish, they eventually found one at 7:30pm, 12 hours after he caught the fish, at a fruit processing plant.
“We weighed it on four separate certified scales and all gave the same exact reading,” Anderson said.
Even after all that the fish still broke the state record. It just makes us wonder what it would’ve come in at had they been able to get it weighed immediately after capture.
