Sport Fishing On Lake Superior: A Kids Memory

A family friend had a small cabin cruiser that was also used as a sport fishing boat. I do not remember their names. I was perhaps 8 years old at the time. The volunteered to take me out fishing one summer day on Lake Superior. Downriggers had not been invented yet and the technique for the old time sport fishermen were to use out riggers. These were long poles that when laid out horizontally reach out from the boat some 20 to 25 feet. You took your line with a silver spoon lure and place the lure in the water and let out about 50 feet of line. Then a beer bottle weight was attached to the line. A beer bottle weight was an old beer bottle was filled with lead and a screw eye was allowed to set in the molten lead. When the lead cooled you broke the glass and had a heavy lead with in the shape of a beer bottle.

So you clipped the beer bottle weight to the line about 50 feet up from the lure then let the line play out from the reel. Now the fishing reel was one of those gigantic deep sea type you see in the fishing films. Sometimes as much as 500 feet was let out.

Releasing the outrigger pole you swung it so it became parallel to the boat and clipped your line to a snap at the end of the pole. Now when the pole was set perpendicular to the boat your linewas in effect about 25 feet away from the boat and the lure then tended to be to the side of the boat instead of directly behind.

Now, sit and wait. When one of those huge Lake Trout struck the lure the outrigger would help set the hook and when the fish fought the pole it would snap the line out of the clip on the outrigger and you then fought the fish mano-e-mano back to the boat.

This means you had to reel in 500 feet of line that had a fish on it, a bottle weight that probably weighed six or seven pounds, the weight of the steel core line and the pressure of the water on the whole mess. Whew!

After trolling around much of the afternoon and allowing me to have the thrill of steering the boat it came time to head for home. So I took up the line after the captain had released the line from the outriggers. As I brought one line it became very apparent that the weight was quite a bit heavier than the other rod I had brought in a few minutes earlier. Sure enough there was a Lake Trout on the line. One that weighed perhaps 4 pounds. Guess what, the bottle weight out weighed the fish. He wasn't big enough to trip the release on the outrigger so we dragged him around until he was dead. Some sport!

I took him home and my Mother made a wonderful broiled Lake Trout dinner. However I was scarred. The whole experience just seemed a little unfair. The excitement of the catch just didn't feel the same as even catching the Jumbo Lake Superior Perch I caught down at the Grand Island landing.