Maine man lands big brown trout after comedy of errors

Justin Wolfinger thought it would be nice to put his canoe into a pond not far from his Waterboro home and troll a line or two in the evening of Aug. 9.

He was alone, so he set one line on a downrigger with a mooselook wobbler lure he hadn’t used in a long time, and the other was a lead core line with a favorite lure he trailed out the side of the boat.

As any fisherman who has ever fished alone knows, there’s a lot to do in a boat when you are by yourself and have two lines in the water. It would be easy if all you had to do was monitor fishing lines, but you are also the only navigator and safety officer.

Wolfinger had barely set his lines when the wind came up and was rapidly taking him toward shore.

Not wanting his downrigger line to catch on bottom, he turned the motor sharply to redirect the canoe, realizing too late that he was going to travel over one of his lines.

Since it was the one on the downrigger, he thought he might get away with it.

But just as the boat was going over the line, a fish struck the mooselook hard, yanking the rod tip down to the water and ripping the line out of the downrigger clip secured to the weight that allows the fisherman to fish at a specific depth.

Now the canoe was passing over a line that was closer to the surface and had slack in it, and wouldn’t you know it, the electric motor propeller caught the line. The motor quickly spooled the line off the reel.

Wolfinger shut the motor off and reeled in four colors of lead core and 100 feet of leader line on the other rod, paddling when he could but mostly getting blown around. With his good line secured, he pulled the motor up to survey the situation.

“It was an absolute mess,” he said.

What wasn’t wound in the prop was trailing behind the canoe, so he used his paddle to gently pull the line to him. Grabbing the line with his bare hand, Wolfinger realized the fish that had created the motor mess was still there, just hanging out.

The minute he put pressure on the line, the fish began to fight hard.

Wolfinger fought the fish for nearly half an hour in a hand-lining style used in ice fishing. Meanwhile the boat kept blowing closer to shore, with occasional paddle strokes by Wolfinger to redirect it.

He was losing the battle with the wind, but it was all about not losing that fish.

Finally, the fish began to tire and wasn’t fighting as hard, allowing Wolfinger to maneuver it with one hand into the waiting net he was holding in the other and bring both boatside, while the wind kept relocating the canoe that was essentially dead in the water.

Suddenly there was cheering from the shoreline. Some of the people who lived in the camps and homes on the pond were having a barbecue on the shore, and had become interested in his struggles, he said.

He hadn’t realized he had attracted an audience.

One of the campers helped him dock the canoe so that he could get a picture of the fish and untangle the line from his motor. He normally practices catch and release, he said, but this fish was too far gone, so he kept it.

The fish was a 7-pound 27 ½ -inch brown trout — Wolfinger’s biggest ever from that pond, whose name he did not release.

He said this week that he hadn’t eaten the brown trout yet but would soon.

“It wasn’t the biggest fish in the world, but definitely one I won’t ever forget,” Wolfinger said.