A sag-bellied record

When I was a youngster I grew up with a fishing pole in my hand; fishing rods, as well (there’s a difference between a pole and a rod.) I also had dreams of catching a fish so big that it’s belly sagged when I held it posing for a photo.

At the beginning of each month, I’d head to Gene Miller’s barber shop to get my monthly haircut. In grade school I’d simply get a plain ol’ buzz cut. Later on I graduated to a stylish flat top and longer styles were in vogue in my late high school years. But that’s not why I did monthly trips to the barber.

Barber Miller had subscriptions to a half dozen outdoor magazines - Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Fur Fish Game and others. Saturday mornings were busy and I always hoped for a crowd so I had plenty of time to go through the magazines. Occasionally, I’d hang around after being “barbed” to thumb through the remaining pages of the magazine I’d been reading. While many of my friends dreamed of becoming a major leaguer, rock-and-roll star or top flight golfer, my dreams were spawned by the pages of those magazines.

So was my imagination. I may have been holding my cane pole down at Mert Harrington’s pond catching six-inch bullheads; in my mind I was in Florida planning to catch a 10 pound largemouth bass. When I switched to a fly rod to angle up stunted bluegills or crappies at Mingle’s pond, my mind was in the Rocky Mountains fishing for native cutthroat trout.

But of all the dreams I gleaned from all the flashy photos in the magazines, none fueled my imagination more than those depicting giant lake trout caught from huge lakes in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Canada. These fish were so big that when the proud angler held them, their belly sagged! Oh, to catch a fish so big it had a saggy belly.

At the time I had no idea lake trout were once available in Lake Michigan, less than an hour’s drive from my Newton County home. Once the apex predator in the Great Lakes, over harvest by commercial fishermen had collapsed the population by the mid-1950s, but stockings by Great Lakes states and the federal government were reinvigorating Great Lakes trout populations.

By the time I started fishing Lake Michigan, lakers were fairly common catches, though few of them had saggy bellies. They certainly do these days and a recent catch of a new Indiana record lake trout emphasizes there are some great trophies available, still less than an hour from my home.

Tyler Kreighbaum, owner of Tightline Fishing Charters in Michigan City, caught the new record trout on Saturday, June 11. It measured 44 inches long and weighed 37.55 pounds, beating the previous state record by about 8 pounds.

The fish was older than Tyler! All the lake trout stocked in Lake Michigan are marked in some way to differentiate them from naturally spawned fish. Back in the day, this was accomplished by clipping one or more fins from the fingerling trout before they were stocked. The fish quickly adapt to a missing pectoral fin or clipped-off adipose fin and by looking for missing fins when they are caught or captured, biologists can tell when and where the fish were planted.

The fin-clip pattern for this trout showed it was stocked in the late 1970s meaning the fish was well into it’s late 30s when caught. Kreighbaum is only 25!

Most lake trout caught in Lake Michigan are caught, kept and eaten. They are usually caught near the lake’s bottom in water 70 feet or more deep. The stress of being caught and hauled up from that deep makes it hard to release them successfully.

Most Lake Michigan lake trout are caught at age eight or 10 and weigh eight or 10 pounds. Those are still nice sized fish and fun to catch.

But their bellies don’t sag.