Registered Maine guides Jake Rackliff and Adam Bergeron were trolling on a southern Maine lake Thursday when they hooked and landed a 10-pound rainbow trout.
The fish measured 29 inches long, 18 inches in girth and weighed 10 pounds, 10 ounces. Bergeron netted it.
Rackliff said the trout put up a hard fight, so they beached the boat to revive the fish before release.
He had been out a couple of times this spring with clients in his canoe, but this was his first time trolling from his boat this season.
They were trolling one color of lead core line with his grandfather’s reel and a Dream Chaser Lures Solid Pink UV when the fish hit.
“My Pepere was looking down on me. I caught it off his mooching reel,” Rackliff said. His Pepere used to catch salmon with it in the Belgrade Lakes region, and his father gave it to him when he received his guide license.
Before releasing the fish, Rackliff measured it and said he plans to have a replica made.
Anglers on his Facebook page had plenty to say:
“That’s the biggest bow I’ve seen in Maine ever. Unreal,” one commenter wrote.
“Steelhead in Maine now, huh?!” another joked.
“That’s a stavah to start the trolling season.”
And, inevitably: “Wasn’t on a fly — doesn’t count.”
The fish fell about three pounds shy of Maine’s state record rainbow trout — a 13-pound, 9-ounce fish caught in 2016 by Timothy Kelley of Arkansas while visiting family in Maine.
That fish was caught in Quarry Pond on Vinalhaven, an island in Penobscot Bay. The small, isolated waterbody was not known to hold rainbow trout at the time and has been debated among some anglers.
