This June marked the 14th year in a row that Josh Gagne and his dad James have fished the LCI Father’s Day Derby on Lake Champlain. The two Vermonters almost had to break with tradition when they totaled their boat two weeks before the tourney. But after buying a new hull and rigging it out, they were ready for its maiden voyage on June 20. The next day they christened it with their first-ever muskie, and one of the biggest ever caught in Vermont.
“When we got [the fish] into the boat, it was laying lengthwise from the starboard stern and almost touching the other side,” Josh says. “It was just unreal.”
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The conditions that weekend were miserable, Josh says, with a series of storms rolling through. On the first day, Saturday, they motored through four-foot rollers to target walleye, northern pike, and smallmouth bass on the Vermont side of Champlain. They lost a nine-pound walleye at the side of the boat but later caught an eight-pound northern.
On Sunday, they moved out to deeper water to troll. Running at a steady two miles an hour, they used walleye setups with 10-pound test and Rapala Floating Minnows that dove to around 15 feet. With one eye on the fish finder, they trolled through 25 feet of water, keeping their lures a good 10 feet above the bottom.
“All of a sudden, one of the rods bent right over and started screaming, and I looked over at my dad and said, ‘We got bottom.’ But then I looked back at the fish finder and thought, ‘Well, we shouldn’t have bottom,’” Josh says. “So my dad picked the rod up and we could see some head shaking on the rod.”
As he turned around to look for their landing net, the fish lunged four feet out the water. Josh heard the splash — it sounded like a beaver tail slapping — and saw the big whirlpool on the surface where the fish had reentered. Judging by the size of the fish’s sides, James thought they either had the world’s biggest pike or a trophy muskie.
When the fish ran straight for the boat, they saw the muskie’s giant head with the crankbait pinned in its jaw. James kept the rod tip just off the surface. He was too afraid to lift it with such a light line.
“He held it there, and we walked it like a dog on a leash for probably half a mile,” says Josh, who was now ready with a salmon net. “Then we came to a dilemma, when we realized the fish was nearly five-feet long … I looked at my dad and said, ‘Our net ain’t big enough for this.’”
By that point, Josh had called his uncle (James’ brother), who was fishing the same derby and was only 10 minutes away. He’d caught a few muskies before and gave them a few tips on how to land the fish. So Josh got the fish’s head into the net while James grabbed its tail, and together they heaved the huge fish over the gunnel and into the boat.
“My uncle, he actually made it to us as we were putting the fish in the boat … And when he saw it, he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s the biggest muskie I’ve ever seen.”
Vermont has strict regulations around muskies and requires that every fish be released as soon as possible. So the two anglers worked quickly to get the fish on their hand scale, which read 40.94 pounds. Josh says the fish was only out of the water for a couple minutes, and they watched it swim all the way the bottom of Lake Champlain after releasing it.
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With that weight, the Gagne’s muskie would have easily broken the current state record of 38 pounds 3.5 ounces, held by Chris Beebe. But since Vermont strictly prohibits the retention of muskies and requires all potential records to be harvested for weighing on a certified scale and inspection by a biologist, Beebe’s record is basically untouchable.
“It wasn’t an eligible species for the tournament, either,” Josh says. “But there is no doubt in my mind that it was the biggest fish caught during the derby.”
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