Les Wooten had the “catch of the day” Sunday morning at Navy Pier. With much help, he landed a 32.5-inch, 14.5-pound lake trout caught on a small shiner on a crappie rig.
“I didn’t have my net so we walked it down to the nearest ladder attached to the pier,” Wooten emailed. “Another fisherman had a short handled net with a shallow bag made for smaller fish. I worked my way down to the last rung of the ladder as one fisherman had my rod, working the fish toward me. Another fisherman handed me the net. It took several tries to dip the fish in the net as [the laker] was so big, it kept falling out. With one lucky lunge, I managed to get enough of the fish’s head and upper body in the net to lift it out of the water. I gave the handle to another fisherman while I grabbed the frame of the net while I ascended up the ladder to a bunch of cheers.”
Wooten’s son Ryan had a similar adventure with a flathead catfish and the help of brothers Jackson and Josh Kennedy in the summer of 2020 on the Fox River. Click here to read that column.
“While my landing the fish wasn’t as dramatic as Ryan’s flathead, it was still an adventure with help from other fishermen on location,” Wooten emailed.
I don’t know, they were both pretty epic tales.
FOTW, the celebration of big fish and their stories (the stories matter, as this one shows) around Chicago fishing, runs Wednesdays in the paper Sun-Times. The online posting here at chicago.suntimes.com/outdoors goes up at varied days of the week, depending on what is going on in the wide world of the outdoors.
To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or Instagram (@BowmanOutside).
