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Posts: 476 Location: WI | Just goes to show you, persistence pays off!!?? Good story though. http://www.lakelandtimes.com/outdoors.php?story=128 Hartford’s Tom Driscoll cradles his “fish of a lifetime,” a gorgeous 50 1/2 inch, 38 pound Lake Tomahawk tiger muskie. By: Kevin McCullough Seeing is believing, but some sights are still hard to believe. When Tom Driscoll gained his first glimpse of the Lake Tomahawk tiger muskie that had swallowed his spinner bait, his suspicion that he was battling an exceptionally large fish was confirmed. His excited description, however, failed to convince his wife, Sandra, and father, James, that he indeed had a monster on a leash. “While I was reeling they were still panfishing, they didn’t stop,” according to Driscoll, who traveled north with his family from Hartford for a few days of rest and relaxation at Indian Shores on Lake Tomahawk in early June. “We stay at Indian Shores two or three times a year. My parents have a permanent place at the campground and we like to bring the kids up to get out on the lake and do a little swimming. We’ve been coming up more than 20 years with the family. We used to camp prior to this, then my parents decided they’d like to have a permanent place there instead of hauling a camper back and forth.” Tom Driscoll and his family – including his wife, Sandra, 5-year-old daughter Sadie, and 3-year-old son Spencer – arrived at Indian Shores for the first time this year the evening of Thursday, June 2, joining his parents, who made the trip north from Fond du Lac. Normally afternoon anglers, Tom, Sandra and James motored out onto Lake Tomahawk for a few hours of fishing around noon Friday, June 3. “It was beautiful, a picture-perfect day without a cloud in the sky. The lake was like glass,” Tom said, recreating the idyllic scene on one of Lake Tom’s many back bays. “We all had caught a couple of little perch and were just talking about leaving the spot, and then I decided to throw the spinner bait out. We still had bobbers in, but there was nothing going on so I thought I’d throw a couple casts out before we went to the next spot.” Driscoll pitched and retrieved one cast, then pivoted and tossed a second cast out into the middle of the bay. Only an hour or so had elapsed since the trio departed from Indian Shores for the afternoon of fishing. “I had reeled the spinner bait about half way back to the boat when I saw one of my bobbers going down. Just when I stopped retrieving, all of a sudden the fish must have took it. When I stopped to look at the bobber I felt the fish hit hard and before I could even react the line was just unwinding,” he recounted, adding that he quickly decided to ignore his submerged bobber. “I had no idea what I had on because the fish just took off and was a lot stronger than I thought a fish could be. Not being an avid fisherman, it was all new to me. I started reeling in as much as I could reel in, but I could not keep up with the fish taking off. The drag was set pretty good on the reel because the fish didn’t break the line.” An admitted sporadic fisherman who usually only wets a line when he vacations with the family at Indian Shores, Driscoll nonetheless knew he had hooked into something special when he got his first look at the ferocious fighter. Casting from the front of the boat, Driscoll managed to reel the muskie close enough to take in its breathtaking size and girth when its tail broke the surface. “I was the only one who saw it up in the front of the boat, so they were looking at me and telling me to get the little fish in and stop exaggerating. Nobody had any idea because I was the only one to see the tail come around,” he said. “I turned and looked at my father and said ‘This fish will not fit in the net, we do not have a net big enough for this fish’ I said I had a huge, huge fish and I showed my wife how big with my arms, and she said ‘Really?’” After the muskie turned tail at the bow, it ducked beneath the boat and shot straight out into the bay. Driscoll said he could not believe how strong the fish was as it walked him around the front of the boat. He kept repeating that he was battling a big fish as he struggled to gain the upper hand in the fight. “It shot out into the center of the bay as fast as the line could come out, then it totally came out of the water. That was the amazing part. I’ve never seen a fish come totally out of the water, especially one that size,” Driscoll said, adding that his wife and father finally got their first look at the muskie after following its powerful run out into the bay. “Now I have their attention. I told them that we had to get all of the other poles in because it was coming back around the boat and I didn’t want him getting tangled up in the other lines.” With the panfish poles quickly reeled in, Driscoll slowly worked the muskie back to the boat. The fish swam beneath the boat once again and, despite Driscoll’s fear that he would lose it on the still submerged anchor rope, the muskie fortunately turned around and slowly surfaced at the back of the boat. “It slowly came up and that’s when we all really knew how big it was – oh my God. That’s when it really got interesting. I’m yelling to get the fish in the net as it was coming up, swaying in the water, trying to regroup, I guess,” he said. When the muskie jumped and totally cleared the water, James said his “jaw dropped” upon his first view of the fish his son was fighting. “I said ‘Did you lose him? Did you lose him?’ Tom said “No, I’ve got him,’ then he reeled him into the boat. Tom wanted me to get the net, but I told him the fish was too deep. Tom said ‘What do you mean, he’s right there,’ so I had to remind him how clear the water is,” James said, noting that the fish was six feet down in water about 10 feet deep. Finally, the muskie appeared to loom close enough to take a stab with the net, but James’ first pass swung over the head of the still-too-deep fish. He connected with the second swoop, but Tom’s estimation that the net was woefully inadequate for the size of the fish became readily apparent. “My father put the net down around the front of the fish and just got the head and about a foot of the body in, with the head in the net so it’s just swishing around. He’s pulling it and pulling it, and the handle of the net was bending right over. I was afraid the fish was going to rip apart the net,” Tom recounted. At that point, Sandra reached around James and grabbed onto the net’s basket, which continued to bend under the weight of the fish. “I said ‘On three,’ and it was like ‘one-three.’ Without Sandra’s help the net would have broke,” according to James. Even with both James and Sandra heaving the fish upward, it was still “quite an effort” to get the muskie into the boat, Tom said. “My wife said she couldn’t believe how heavy it was when they were trying to get it out of the water. I couldn’t believe it either when I was trying to hold it for a picture,” he said. Once the fish made it into the bottom of the boat, Tom thought “Oh my God, I can’t believe I caught this” as Sandra moved to the front of the boat to get away from the agitated muskie. “The fish was not happy to be there, but we got the anchor up right away and threw a towel over its head so it wasn’t sloshing around everywhere. We proceeded quickly into Indian Shores but we didn’t dock in our normal spot. We just motored up to the first dock,” Tom said. Once at the dock, James retrieved his truck and the muskie, still in the net, was transferred from the boat and taken to the family campsite. Other campers questioned why the trio had returned from fishing so quickly, and one look at the fish provided an emphatic answer. “The great part about it was that it was the weekend of a muskie tournament so there were numerous people there, so we showed everybody,” Tom said. “We were lucky that my father’s neighbor across the way, Mark Jacobs, is a very, very avid muskie fisherman. He came over with an electronic scale and he weighed it for us, and he told us we had to do something with the fish, now.” Regular customers of Captain Hooks in Lake Tomahawk, the Driscolls took the massive muskie into town and “all the hoopla” started all over again, Tom said. “People were stopping in the road, and one guy said, ‘I’ve been fishing for 20 some years and I’ve never caught anything like that.’ It was a neat feeling being with all the people who do this stuff quite often and were amazed by this fish,” he said. Folks were amazed for good reason. Driscoll’s muskie, a beautiful tiger, measured 501/2 inches and tipped the scales at a whopping 38 pounds, with a 24-inch girth. A couple of 20-some-inch northern were his largest fish prior to the big hybrid, so Driscoll knew he wanted to have the memorable catch mounted. He contacted Gary Michalsen at Lake Tomahawk Taxidermy, who documented the muskie’s measurements and aged the fish. Muskies are aged by counting the annual rings of the cleithra bone found behind the gill flap, and Michalsen estimated the 501/2-inch hybrid’s age at approximately 12 to 13 years old. The muskie’s stomach was empty, he said. “That’s a really young fish as far as muskies go. Twelve or 13 years old is really young for a fish that big. It would take a silver muskie 15 to 18 years to get that big. They don’t stock hybrids so that’s a natural tiger, and it’s the biggest out of Lake Tomahawk that I’ve seen in 25 years up here,” Michalsen said, adding that hybrids tend to grow more rapidly than true muskies because most tigers don’t expend the excess energy necessary for spawning. The tiger muskie, a possible world line class record, inhaled Driscoll’s little Number 3 Mepps spinner. Driscoll believes the line he was using was in the 25-pound test range, but he’s uncertain where it would actually test out. He’s been in contact with the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward and is in the process of filling out the necessary paperwork and following the required procedures for submitting a possible line class record. The current world record for all tackle is a 51-pound, three-ounce hybrid pulled from Lac Vieux Desert by John Knobla in July of 1919. The unlimited class record also came from Lac Vieux Desert, Delores Ott-Lapp’s 50-pound, four-ounce fish taken in June of 1951. While those records are obviously out of reach, Driscoll’s 38-pound tiger is heavier than all of the following line class records for hybrid muskies: • 17-pound test, John Rak, Chippewa Flowage, 28-pound, 12-ounce, 8-2-02. • 20-pound test, Marvin Erickson, Lake Francis Case, South Dakota, 35 pounds, 3-21-01. • 25-pound test, George Keller, Lake Finley, 36 pounds, nine ounces, 8-3-84. • 30-pound test, Kenneth Mathwig, Lac Vieux Desert, 34 pounds, three ounces, 7-19-88. • 36-pound test, Jeff Hagemann, Big St. Germain Lake, 36 pounds, 9-7-91. Michalsen expects to have Driscoll’s mount done sometime next spring, and the lucky fisherman is considering one or two spots in his home where the fish will eventually adorn the wall. “I won’t get the fish back until next spring, but I’ll be waiting for that. I’ll make a special trip for that as soon as (Michalsen) says it’s ready. I won’t wait until our normal June trip, I’ll come up and get it whenever he calls and says it’s done,” Driscoll said, noting that the excitement of that early June afternoon is still subsiding. “My brother, Dale, and my father have come up north in the fall for 20-some years and go muskie fishing. That’s all they do and they have never caught anything like this, either, so everyone’s amazed. I think my dad and brother are more amazed because they keep saying that it’s the fish of a lifetime.” In fact, shortly after the catch Driscoll dialed up his brother, who was camping in southern Wisconsin, to share the story. After telling his brother that he “wouldn’t believe what we caught,” Driscoll related the story surrounding the catch and relayed the tiger muskie’s impressive size. “He just could not believe it – so much so that 15 or 20 minutes go by and the phone rings. Here it’s him, talking to my dad. ‘Did he really catch that or is he just handing me a bunch of bull?’ My dad said yes, I caught it, the fish of a lifetime.” Hybrid highlights The tiger muskie is the hybrid of the northern pike and muskie. It is usually infertile and has characteristics of both parents. The hybrid has distinct tiger bars on a light background, similar to the barred coloration pattern of some muskie. Its fins and tail lobes are rounded like a northern pike’s, but are colored like a muskie’s. The cheekscale and mandible-pore patterns are intermediate between a northern pike’s and a muskie’s. The tiger muskie grows slightly faster than either pure-strain parent in the first several years of life and, as Driscoll’s fish shows, can exceed 30 pounds. Some tiger muskie occur naturally, though most hybrids are produced in hatcheries. They are useful in stocking because they grow quickly and endure high temperatures better than either parent does. Hybrids are easier to raise in a hatchery than pure-strain muskie, they reach legal size sooner and they are easier to catch. Posted: June 17, 2005 GotOne Edited by GOTONE 6/27/2005 3:33 PM Attachments ----------------  bigmuskie028-05.jpg (36KB - 249 downloads) | ||
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