Keith Knight of Corinna was looking for a distraction. He had lost his cousin to cancer on Friday and fishing seemed like a good idea.
Services are being planned in New Jersey as a central gathering place for the family scattered across the country. The death of someone so young — in his early 40s — and close to him felt pretty heavy.
“A good day of fishing helps ease things,” he said.
Knight chose Wassookeag Lake in Dexter because it is about 10 minutes from his home. He has fished that lake before, and he keeps going back to it because it’s close, even though he says he never catches much.
He caught a perch there once, he said.
So, on Sunday he and his wife Cheyenne packed up their equipment and trekked out on the lake’s ice. They brought food and prepared to spend the day. While there, Knight, who has worked as a welder-fabricator for Cianbro since 2016, reconnected with a friend he hadn’t seen in 10 years.
They all set traps and their lines were in the water by 8:30 a.m., he said.
Knight had a few flags that he described as “hit and spit,” meaning a fish grabbed the bait but spit it out before getting hooked. Another fisherman caught two salmon around 1 p.m.
It looked like another day of being skunked on Wassookeag. The fishermen were pulling traps up around 4 p.m., calling it a day, when one of Knight’s flags went up as he walked out of his shack to take care of his own lines.
All of them ran to the trap that had the flag up. Knight let the fish run the line out a ways, but when he set the hook, he knew it wasn’t a perch.
“It was a good one,” he said.
When Knight had pulled the fish close to the hole and could see it had some size, it took off again, pulling out another 30 feet of line from his hand.
Knight fought the fish to pull it back in toward the hole and almost lost it there when it spit the hook as it came out of the water.
“I was going to go in after him if I had to, but there was 2 ½ feet of ice,” Knight said.
It was a 22 ½ -inch togue weighing about 4 pounds and was Knight’s first togue ever.
He kept the fish, fileted it and froze it for later.
“It was a good day,” he said.
