When 14-year-old Mason Magee of Nipigon hooked a big fish on the afternoon of Jan. 31, he did not know he was minutes away from landing a new Ontario record.
When he saw the 40-inch burbot with a 23.5-inch girth flopping on the ice, however, his fishing party understood it was something special.
Magee had ventured out on the ice that afternoon with family and friends on what was originally an outing for whitefish on Lake Nipigon, near Beardmore. As evening closed in, however, they decided to stay a little later to target burbot.
Magee said he was jigging with a blue Throat Punch tube jig, when he felt his line stop cold.
“At first, I thought it was a big lake trout,” he said, adding how he quickly realized he was tangling with a substantial burbot. “It ran quite a bit and went to bottom before I fought it back in. It put up a good fight.”
They immediately weighed it.
“We had a scale that said it was 23 pounds, but we weren’t sure that our scale was accurate,” he said.
So, they drove to Nipigon to a store that had a certified scale. They then discovered that their own scale was not far off. The store’s scale registered 23.04 pounds — a new provincial record for burbot.
Asked how he felt about being Ontario’s newest angling record holder, the laid-back Grade 9 student said, “It was pretty cool fish.”
Cool, however, does not quite cover it.
Magee’s fish beat Ontario’s previous record burbot by slightly more than five pounds. That fish weighed 17.95 pounds and was 39 inches long and 19-inches in girth, and was caught on Lake Simcoe, near Orillia on Jan. 25, 2017 by Sebastien Roy.
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