Big fish

Anglers aspiring to best Lloyd Bull’s 72-pound world-record lake trout caught in Great Bear Lake, N.W.T. in 1995 take note: last Friday, July 17, Deline, N.W.T., resident George Kenny netted an 83-pound laker. This according to a story published July 21 on CBC.ca. Kenny netted the monster while fishing near Broken Plate Creek along Great Bear Lake. According to the CBC story:

“Kenny said his son was a bit startled when he first spotted the large trout.

“He was kind of…scared of it,” Kenny told CBC News on Monday. “But I told him it’s only a bit alive. It’s not going to doing nothing.”

Efforts to revive and release the lake trout unfortunately weren’t successful, so the pair kept the fish and plan to have it mounted. Kenny claims he caught an even larger laker in 2008 that was successfully released back into the lake.

This latest laker isn’t even close to the largest lake trout ever caught, a 102-pound fish captured in a gill net in Lake Athabasca, Saskatchewan in 1961. (There’s a replica of that fish at the museum in Fort McMurray, Alberta.) Still, it’s heartening news for trophy trout hunters that a lake trout even large than Bull’s current record fish is surely swimming in Canadian waters.