Shawn Jacobs of Belfast and his buddy Dustin Nadeau of Searsport fish Moosehead Lake just a couple times a season.
They leave the midcoast at 5 a.m. and get back home by 11 p.m.
The two friends were finishing their first Moosehead outing this season on Sunday in about 60 feet of water in front of Mount Kineo when they thought they had caught bottom with the fishing line that was on their downrigger — a piece of equipment used to troll at a specific water depth.
Since each fisherman can legally have two lines in the water at once, the men reeled in those not connected to their downrigger to avoid tangles. When they pulled up the downrigger weight, which is used to keep the lines submerged, it had an extra cable attached to it.
Nadeau, 46, started pulling on that cable and found a downrigger weight and fishing line release mechanism that wasn’t theirs attached to it, Jacobs said. Nadeau started pulling up the other end of the cable and remarked on how heavy it was.
“Sure enough. We could see this gold downrigger starting to come up from the bottom,” he said.
Jacobs, 53, decided he would try to find the owner and posted his lost and found on a couple of Facebook fishing pages Sunday when he got home.
Five people responded to his post, but just one of them was the piece of equipment’s owner. Walter Longley of Litchfield had lost it Saturday — on his birthday.
“I was totally shocked that someone had found it. It was only one day since I lost it. It was in over 60 feet of water. It was truly a miracle,” Longley said Tuesday.
Jacobs was very surprised too, he said. He has caught an old fishing line before and pulled it out of the water, but this was the first time a downrigger was dangling from the other end.
He and Nadeau had a good laugh about how losing a downrigger must not happen too often, he said, but soon learned from the responses to his Facebook post that it was more common than he thought.
The men were watching their daughters play high school softball on Monday when they talked about how great it would be to find the downrigger’s owner and return the expensive-looking piece of equipment, Jacobs said. Longley contacted him that afternoon.
“Being a sportsman isn’t just catching fish or taking game. It’s doing the right thing when no one is around. I know how I’d feel if I lost my downrigger. (I’m) doing what I hope the next (person) would do,” he said.
The downrigger wasn’t the men’s only catch that day. They caught nine landlocked salmon and six togue too.
What lesson did Jacobs and Nadeau learn from this experience?
“I have copper name tags from trapping I’m going to mount on (my downrigger) — with stainless steel screws — just in case,” Jacobs said.
