BIG MACK
The “Old Fish and the Man” may not be a best seller, but it could be the title of a story Robert McDowall will be telling for a few years. The 45-year-old missionary from the Valley, near Chewelah, won’t have to compromise the foundation of his faith with the angler’s tendency to stretch the truth, either.
The mackinaw he caught in Priest Lake in May needs no embellishments.
It was genuinely big.
And old.
McDowall was fishing Priest with his father, Bob, much as he’s done for years. The anglers say they prefer the taste of the shrimp-fed Priest Lake mackinaw as opposed to the purely fish-fed macks in other area lakes.
“I go as often as I can in winter and spring,” McDowall said. “Most of the fish are in the 4- to 6-pound range, that’s the perfect size for eating. Once they get bigger than 7 or 8 pounds, their texture isn’t as good for eating and I usually release them back into the lake.”
That’s what he did with the 27-pounder he caught in April, just two weeks before he met the “old timer” on May 9.
They were downrigging, fishing right on the bottom, about 150 feet deep in Mack Alley south of Barto Island.
“I was using a chartreuse M2 flatfish,” McDowall said. “It’s been a good lure. I put a little piece of squawfish meat on the trailing hook.”
It was stacking up to be a good day in which the anglers landed a total of 10 mackinaw (also known as lake trout), including the one that bent McDowall’s rod at around 11 a.m.
“At first I assumed it was one of the normal 4- to 6-pounders until it started peeling off line,” he said. “It wasn’t like a rainbow that rips off line. It just went out steady and the rod doubled over.
“I said, ‘Dad, it’s a big one!’ We had four lines out, so he started pulling up the other lines and downriggers in a flurry of panic. He even got the downrigger arms off the side of the boat. He knew it was a monster.”
The fish wouldn’t come off the bottom at first. “I got it up 8 or 10 feet, and then it went down again,” he said.
The rod tip would wiggle, telegraphing the fish’s head-shaking to the angler above and making him second-guess the knot’s he’d tied in the 15-pound Maxima line.
The fish grudgingly came up 20 feet and then dove to the bottom again and forced McDowall to waltz from bow to stern before he began to relent.
“Dad netted the fish — I have a nice, big net — and we just sat there dumbfounded,” McDowall said. “My goal has always been to catch a 30-pound mackinaw. I promised myself that when I caught a 30-pounder, it was going on the wall.”
The wait paid off. The fish measured 43 inches long, 30 inches in girth and weighed 40.2 pounds on the Berkley digital scale McDowall has verified as accurate.
“There again, my dad and I just sat there in reverence,” he said. “We just stared at it.”
And then they kept fishing, releasing a 17-pounder soon afterward.
“There was nobody on the dock when we got there, but we showed it off to people at the gas station,” he said. “In about half the cases, their first words were expletives, and most of them came from women. I must say, their reaction was enjoyable.”
McDowall didn’t bother having the fish weighed on official scales, since he knew it had no chance of breaking the Idaho state record of 57 pounds, 8 ounces caught in Priest Lake in 1971.
Still, it’s 5 pounds bigger than the Washington state record.
Even though big fish are caught every year in Priest Lake, Idaho fisheries biologists were amazed.
“You catch smaller lakers in the 15-21 inch range that have teeth scars on them after being grabbed by larger fish, so you know there are a few big boys down there feeding on some pretty good-size fish, but we rarely get to see them,” said Ned Horner, Idaho Fish and Game Department regional fisheries manager in Coeur d’Alene. “This is the largest mack I’ve dealt with in decades.”
Horner put the lunker’s head in a freezer, knowing that Michael Hansen, a fisheries professor and lake trout expert from the Great Lakes region, would be visiting North Idaho from summer through fall to consult with the Idaho Fish and Game Department on lake trout and walleye issues in Lake Pend Oreille.
Horner tapped Hansen’s expertise to analyze the growth rings in the otolith, a bone in the head of the fish that helps the fish “hear” and maintain equilibrium.
After a tedious process of extraction, mounting on a glass slide, digitizing and analyzing under a microscope, Hansen pegged the mack’s age at 27 years. That’s an old fish, although it isn’t extraordinarily big for a species known to live to 42 years in the heavily fished waters of Lake Superior and up to 50 years in the lightly fished waters of the arctic.
Still, it’s a lunker for Priest Lake.
The lake trout is a slow-growing, late-maturing native to lakes and streams of northern North America. In 1925, the U.S. Fish Commission introduced the species into Priest Lake, which met the mackinaw’s requirements for pristine waters.
Idaho Fish and Game Department records show that anglers caught only about 200 mackinaw a year in Priest into the early ‘70s, when the lake was still mainly known for cutthroat trout and kokanee.
That changed in 1971, when Priest produced the 57.5-pound state record mackinaw. Most of the macks in the lake were in the 20-pound range at that time, researchers say.
By 1978, anglers had boosted the annual harvest to 5,700 lake trout. By 1983, a combination of increasing fishing pressure and declining kokanee — the primary food source for bigger macks — dropped the average size of the mackinaw to about 4 pounds.
By the ‘90s, mackinaw were getting to be the only game in the lake, and the state changed regulations to encourage harvests that increased to 14,000 macks in 1994 and 30,000 by 2003, when most of the fish caught in the lake were running just over 2 pounds.
So any way you look at it, a 40-pounder caught in Priest Lake is a fish worth remembering, even if it costs a bundle.
“I’m mounting the fish and that’s one thing,” McDowall said. “But we started looking for a place to hang it and my wife is suggesting we get another house.”