Gary Gilbert, a 55-year-old Becker resident, and his wife Ann stumbled upon a monster of a fish June 17 while walleye fishing Lake Mille Lacs near Garrison.

 

Gilbert said he saw a big, white belly floating in the water and thought it was a huge walleye, so he boated up to it to take a look. When he hoisted it from the lake, he immediately turned to have his photo taken.

 

“After I held it up for a photo and measured it, I just dropped it back in,” he said. “I figured that was the way to show some respect for the fish. It still smelled up my boat for two weeks.”

 

The fish, a 59-1/2” muskie, would have officially been a state record had Gilbert caught the fish by rod and reel. The state record as it stands for a catch-and-release muskie is 56-7/8” caught by Andrew Slette of Hawley on Pelican Lake in 2016.

 

Minnesota’s official state record for a kept — and killed to be weighed on a certified scale — muskie still stands as a 1957 fish caught by Art Lyons on Lake Winnibigosh that measured 56 inches and weighed 54 pounds.

 

Once Gilbert hauled in the beast, he posed for the photo, then laid the fish down to measure it against a fishing rod. Gilbert marked the precise point on the rod and wasn’t sure of the complete length number until he returned to shore and measured the spot on the rod.

 

“I’m confident in that length to within a quarter of an inch,” Gilbert said, noting some friends were incredulous at first. “I’m an engineer. I know how to measure stuff.”

 

Steve Mero, a fisheries specialist in the Grand Rapids office of the Department of Natural Resources said, “People may not realize that not every muskie can grow to this size.”

 

Mero, who sits on a DNR committee overseeing muskellunge, said Gilbert’s fish could be around 25 years old. 

 

“These are a handful of exceptional fish, and this fish is within that group of rare outliers.”

 

Mero noted the photo of Gilbert holding the fish appears to show it’s missing its right pelvic fin. Those fins were clipped in muskies stocked in Mille Lacs in 1992 and 1999. 

 

“Given the size of the fish, if in fact that is a clipped fin, I would really lean toward the 1992 stocking,” he said.

 

While muskies aren’t native to Mille Lacs, it’s among a relatively small number of lakes in the state where muskies can find the forage — namely tullibees, or ciscoes — to grow massive. Mero says length — not weight — is probably a more valuable measure, since an individual fish’s weight varies throughout a single season as it produces eggs (all monster muskies are females), suffers through stressful periods and gorges itself in the fall on fatty prey.

 

“Many females won’t get over 54 inches, no matter where they live.” Mero says. “Think about how many 7-foot people there are in the world. There’s a genetic element at work in a fish like this.”