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Minnesota Capt. Kent Paulsen had a banner Labor Day on Lake Superior. By 7 a.m., David and Chris Cichosz, the husband-and-wife duo he had on board, had been properly on their approach to a double restrict of lake trout throughout their first-ever outing on the lake. So, they shifted gears and began focusing on coho salmon (also called silver salmon). Inside minutes, that they had a pending state-record coho within the web.
“We already had a bunch of lake trout within the boat, so I arrange trolling for cohos with dodgers and flies,” Paulsen, 39, tells Out of doors Life. “I bought the lures down about 50 ft, simply above the thermocline in 80 ft of 50-degree water. At 7:30 a.m., a scorching fish hit and pulled about 100 ft of line off the reel drag earlier than my angler, David Chihosz, may get the rod and begin preventing the fish.”
It took about 5 minutes for Chihosz, an ex-Marine from Wabasha, Minnesota, to deliver the fish near Paulsen’s 33-foot Chris-Craft boat, the True North II. Paulsen netted the fish and instantly knew it was a potential state report.
“We’ve been prepping for large salmon all yr, and I anticipated a report to be caught, I knew this was the fish,” Paulsen says. “I weighed it on my boat scales, and it learn 11 kilos. I advised David and his spouse Chris that is going to be a fish to recollect. That’s once we introduced within the downriggers and fishing strains and headed again to shore to have the fish formally weighed.”
It was a fast 3-mile run again to Lake Head Marina, the place Paulsen’s FishNorth MN constitution enterprise is predicated. They instantly took the salmon to the Tremendous One grocery retailer in close by Duluth, the place the fish weighed 10.92 kilos on a licensed scale. It measured 29 inches lengthy. If authorized by the Minnesota Division of Pure Sources, Chihosz’s salmon will change the present state report of 10.38 kilos, which dates all the best way again to 1970.
Technically, a brand new state coho report had been submitted to the DNR days earlier on Sept. 2, in accordance with the Duluth Information Tribune. That 10.06-pound coho was additionally caught from Lake Superior. It was a possible state report as a result of the DNR is at present revising its report fish program by reclassifying some data caught earlier than 1980 as “historic” and opening the door to new licensed weight data.
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Paulsen says it’s been an distinctive summer time for coho salmon fishing on western Lake Superior. In contrast to in a few of the different Nice Lakes, cohos have a self-sustaining inhabitants there that doesn’t require further stocking by the DNR.
“The following day we took the coho to DNR headquarters at French River, the place Nick Petersen is the native head of the fisheries crew,” Paulsen says. “He recognized the fish as a coho, helped with the paperwork for data. We donated the fish to DNR to allow them to do analysis on it, find out about its age, well being, what it had been consuming, and many others.”
On common years, Paulsen’s anglers catch largely 3- to 6-pounders, however he says the salmon appear greater and fatter this yr on account of considerable shares of ciscoes and different baitfish within the lake. In actual fact, he believes the state coho report may get damaged once more earlier than the season ends later this month.
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