Monster muskie found floating
would have broken state record had it been caught alive. PUBLISHED: June 28, 2017 at 7:15 pm | UPDATED: June 28, 2017 at 9:20 pm 
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As Gary Gilbert began lifting the thing out of the water, he couldn’t believe its size.
“It just kept coming and coming,” said Gilbert.
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Gilbert was about to be hoisting a 59 1/2-inch muskie — a rare specimen that likely would have set a state record had it been caught alive and was among the oldest and biggest the fish are capable of getting.
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“People may not realize that not every muskie can grow to this size,” said Steve Mero, a fisheries specialist in the Grand Rapids office of the Department of Natural Resources. “These are a handful of exceptional fish, and this fish is within that group of rare outliers.”
Mero, who sits on a DNR committee overseeing muskellunge, said Gilbert’s fish could be around 25 years old. He noted the photo of Gilbert holding the fish appears to show it’s missing its right pelvic fin. Those fins were clipped in muskies stocked in Mille Lacs in 1992 and 1999. “Given the size of the fish, if in fact that is a clipped fin, I would really lean toward the 1992 stocking,” he said.
Gilbert, a 55-year-old Becker resident, and his wife Ann stumbled upon the beast June 17 while walleye fishing Lake Mille Lacs near Garrison.
“We were just tooling along and I saw this big white belly,” Gilbert said Wednesday. “I thought it was a big walleye and wanted to take a look.”
The fish was bent in an upside-down U shape, and so much of it was beneath the surface its true size wasn’t apparent until he got close and reached overboard.
Once aboard, the fish was laid down and measured against a fishing rod separately by Gilbert and his wife. The numerical value of that length wasn’t clear until Gilbert was ashore later that day and measured the spot on the rod.
“I’m confident in that length to within a quarter of an inch,” Gilbert said, noting some friends were incredulous at first. “I’m an engineer. I know how to measure stuff.”
Not a muskie fisherman, Gilbert said he didn’t fully appreciate the exceptional nature of the fish until the buzz in his circle of friends reached those more familiar with muskies.
The current Minnesota record for a catch-and-release muskie is 56 7/8 inches, a fish caught by Andrew Slette of Hawley on Pelican Lake in Otter Tail County in June 2016.
MUSKIE RECORDS AND LOREAny talk of a “record muskie” immediately evokes an entire genre of lore and controversy — and amusement thereof — among muskie anglers.
The Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wis., recognizes Louis Spray’s 63 1/2-inch, 69-pound fish caught on the Chippewa Flowage in 1949 as the largest ever caught. However, the International Game Fish Association, like many, dispute the validity of Spray’s fish and recognize its predecessor, a 60 1/4-inch, 67 1/2-pound fish caught by his rival, Cal Johnson, that same year on nearby Lac Courte Oreilles. Entire books have been written on the controversies over those and other purported world-record muskies.
Others reject both those fish — and even all from that era. The Modern Day Muskellunge World Record Program recognizes a 58-inch, 58-pound muskie caught in 2012 by Joe Seeberger on Lake Bellaire in Michigan. The weight, not the length, is the determining factor in such official records.
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Minnesota’s official state record for a kept — and killed to be weighed on a certified scale — muskie still stands as a 1957 fish caught by Art Lyons on Lake Winnibigoshish that measured 56 inches and weighed 54 pounds. (Even that record was borne out of controversy from a different fish.)
Today, a catch-and-release ethic pervades muskie angling, especially in Minnesota. Muskie anglers successfully lobbied lawmakers in 2014 to increase the minimum length for keeping a fish to 54 inches. As such, many anglers believe Lyons’ record has been “broken” numerous times, but the fish were released and never weighed. It’s conceivable that a record-breaking fish could be caught but that it would be illegal to keep it.
In recent years, a new type of record has emerged: catch-and-release records, estimated by length. Minnesota currently keeps such records for muskies, lake sturgeon and flathead catfish.
RARE LENGTHScientifically speaking, length is probably a more valuable measure than weight, since an individual fish’s weight varies throughout a single season as it produces eggs (all monster muskies are females), suffers through stressful periods and gorges itself in the fall on fatty prey.
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But it doesn’t shrink in length. While growth slows tremendously for muskies as they reach old age, they aren’t believed to actually stop growing. But that doesn’t mean every fish will reach 59 1/2 inches if it manages to stay healthy long enough. While muskies aren’t native to Mille Lacs, it’s among a relatively small number of lakes in the state where muskies can find the forage — namely tullibees, or ciscoes — to grow massive. But it takes more than that to reach 59 1/2 inches, Mero said.
“Many females won’t get over 54 inches, no matter where they live. Think about how many 7-foot people there are in the world. There’s a genetic element at work in a fish like this.”
Gilbert said he had no reason to keep the fish.
“After I held it up for a photo, I just dropped it back in,” he said. “I figured that was the way to show some respect for the fish. It still smelled up my boat for two weeks.”
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