Cayden Graham has been ice fishing Missisquoi Bay on Vermont’s Lake Champlain since before he could walk. His father first took him out on the ice as a toddler, and at this point, the 23-year-old angler knows what to expect from most of his fishing spots. Which is why Graham was so surprised on March 1, when he hooked and landed a monster 49.25-inch muskie — a historic catch for both Cayden and the state of Vermont.
“It was just another day on the ice,” Graham tells Outdoor Life. “I got out around 8 or 9 in the morning and it was a beautiful sunny bright day, with temps about 30 degrees, perfect ice-fishing weather. The ice was about 2 feet thick and had about 6 or 7 inches of snow on top of it, so I drove my truck in a circle around where I wanted to set up to clear some space and then started drilling holes.”
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Graham’s plan was to set up in a wide open, underwater flat where the water depth ranged between 10 and 12 feet deep.
“I like areas like that during March because it gives me a lot of options,” says Graham. “There’s plenty of panfish to jig up from the shanty and I can set up my tip-ups around me to target any bigger fish, like pike or bass, that are staging up and moving into the shallows to get ready to spawn.”
Having his strategy down to a science, Graham drilled 10 more holes in a wide oval pattern around the shanty. This allowed him to cover the entire flat with his tip-ups while still being able to monitor them from the shanty windows. He baited his tip-up lines with some large shiners and then returned to the shanty to start fishing.
“It was a pretty good morning,” Graham says. “I was catching a mess of bluegill and pumpkinseed in little flurries and had a couple flags go up. They only ended up being a couple small pike, so nothing too exciting, but there was enough activity going on that I was keeping an eye out.”
Right around noon, Graham looked out the window and saw the flag of one of his tip-ups waving in the air about 30 yards from the shanty. Expecting another small pike, he went over to check it. But when he looked in the hole, he got a big surprise.
“I looked down and saw that I was almost completely spooled out,” Graham says. “I was like, ‘Oh wow he’s on a mission.’ So I quickly pulled the tip-up and set the hook. It felt like I was trying to pull an anchor up off the bottom and I immediately knew it was a bigger fish.”
Thinking he had a monster pike, Cayden began carefully working the fish back to the hole, letting it run whenever it needed to.
“I only had a 20-pound leader on that set up and was really afraid it was going to break. So, I was being super careful. Eventually I got her directly beneath the hole and I saw her head and I started shaking a bit because I thought it was an absolutely giant pike.”
Graham continued to fight the fish for 10 or 15 minutes. It kept turning sideways, and its head wouldn’t fit through the 8-inch hole. Eventually, he lay down and stuck his arm down into the water all the way to the shoulder to try and grab the fish. He couldn’t quite get hold of it, and as he pulled his arm back out of the hole, he saw a sudden flash of gold from below.
“That’s when I knew it was a muskie,” he says. “I got a rush like I hadn’t had before and I just started trying to maneuver her. I honestly didn’t know if I could fit the fish through the hole and was screaming, ‘Oh my God’ over and over, but I finally managed to grab her and just squeak her through the hole and onto the ice. I was in complete disbelief.”
Graham quickly measured the fish at just over 49 inches with a 23-inch girth. He snapped a couple of quick pictures before releasing the fish. Then he contacted Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, who were beyond thrilled to hear about his catch.
A Fishery Revived
“Cayden’s fish is incredibly significant to us,” says VFWD fisheries biologist Shawn Goode, “because it means that what we’re doing something right in our efforts to try and bring back the muskie [to Lake Champlain.] It shows us that it’s not only working, but working well enough to produce a fish of this caliber.”
Vermont is the only state in New England with a native muskie population, but the species had mostly disappeared from the state’s waters by the 1970s. Since 2010, Goode and his team have been working to restore the fish to its native range in the Missisquoi River and Missisquoi Bay.
“We’ve been stocking a strain of muskie from New York, principally from the Chazy River, which is directly across the lake and where they have been stocked since 1968,” Goode says. “However, New York only provides us with muskie on a surplus basis when they have extra fish available.”
Goode says he and other fisheries biologists have stocked nearly 70,000 muskie fingerlings into the Missisquoi River and the bay it feeds since 2010. He thinks Graham’s fish is a promising sign of more good things to come.
“The purpose of the program is to develop a self-sustaining fishery,” Goode tells Outdoor Life. “Graham’s fish is such a great sign for us because it’s the largest fish that’s been caught since we began the stocking program 16 years ago … Even in a great muskie fishery, the fish are challenging [to catch]. Now we’re getting to the point where anglers can target them and even catch them accidentally like Cayden did, meaning they’re finally becoming a viable species.”
Graham’s fish was also just a few inches shy of the state record, which was caught by angler Chris Beebe from the Missisquoi River. Beebe landed his fish in 2005, the last year that a muskie bigger than 48 inches was recorded in Vermont.
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“To be honest, I’m still in disbelief,” Graham says. “Not only was it my first muskie, which makes catching it just the experience of a lifetime, but it’s also really pushed me to learn more about them. I really want to try targeting muskie in open water now and become a full-time muskie angler … I can’t wait for summer to come around so I can get started.”
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