Fishing is better in Maine--just look at the perch these guys caught

OK, I lied.  It is actually an Atlantic halibut.  A 257 pound, 7'4" long halibut.  Josh Lawson caught it off shore not too far from my Maine place.  Not bad Josh.  'Course, if it'd been on my line, I would have thrown it back. I only keep the big ones.

Ice fishing in Maine Part Deux

I posted earlier about my childhood memories of ice fishing in Maine and about a guy who got a nice trout up there recently. Turns out that sucker was just a guppy. Check out this fish tale about Bruno Doucette who landed a 38 inch, 21.2 pound trout.

It's been a few decades, but I'm thinking of taking ice fishing back up. For the record (pun intended), Mr. Doucette's fish is nice, but not even close to the biggest trout ever landed in the state. The reord is more than ten pounds heavier at 31.5 pounds.

I remember ice fishing on Pushaw Pond when I was a kid growing up in Maine

And it was cold.  But it was fun, especially when the little red flag popped up and you ran out and pulled up the fish.  Normally pickerel or perch, but every once in a while a nice brook trout.  Maybe it would have been a whole lot funner if I'd ever got a more than four and a half pound trout like Scott Hersey did.  Scott used to go to lakes and ponds in his grandfather's airplane as a kid in the early seventies.  His gramps used to strap an old "Swedish spoon" hand auger to the skis of his plane that he had used as a kid in the '30s.  That type of hand auger was what I remember using--and auguring through a foot of ice was the only time I remember being warm.  Nowadays, Scott and most everyone else uses a nice gas powered auger that makes life a whole lot easier.  But for some reason he decided to bring his grandfather's old hand auger along on a trip to Moosehead lake.  That forced him to auger in near the shore where the ice is always thinner, and also where his grandfather always said the brook trout winter.  His gramps was either right about the the winter location of the brookies, or he was watching over Scott (or maybe both), cuz look what Scott got: