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This is no trout

by BILL BULEY
Staff Writer | August 14, 2010 9:00 PM

COEUR d'ALENE - Want to know what it's like reeling in a state-record pike?

Let Kim Fleming tell you.

"It was like pulling in a log," he said.

The Coeur d'Alene man hooked a 40-pound, 2-ounce, northern pike in Twin Lakes last Friday.

That broke the old mark of 39 pounds, 13 ounces set in 2007 in Lake Coeur d'Alene by Bob Ringer of Post Falls.

Fleming laughed about his catch on Friday, since he wasn't even after pike.

"We were trout fishing," he said with a shake of his head. "You know how it goes. If you're fishing for trout, you catch pike. If you're fishing for pike, you catch trout."

Fleming and a friend had been out trolling for about 45 minutes when his pole - with a Wedding Ring with a worm at the end - began bending sharply around 10 a.m. At first, he thought he had snagged the bottom and told his friend to stop the pontoon.

As they backed up, Fleming got a look at what was on the end of the line as it surfaced.

"I said, 'Randy, this isn't the bottom. It's a fish,'" he said.

"Then, it took off."

A 30-minute battle followed before Fleming reeled the monster-sized fish near the boat.

His friend Randy had a net ready, got a good look at the girth of the pike, and said, "We need a bigger net."

Again, the fish dove deep, again Fleming brought it back up, and this time the men managed to get it in the boat by using a bowhook.

That's when, as Fleming said, it got a little crazy.

"They say pike don't fight much until you get them in the boat," he said, smiling. "When we got it in the boat, it went nuts."

As the 51 1/2-inch pike thrashed and flopped, Fleming said part of its tail broke off.

Once it stopped fighting, he got a good look at the pike, and even for a man who has caught a 225-pound blue marlin in Hawaii, this was a keeper, for sure.

"You don't know what you got until you see it," he said.

At the urging of other anglers, Fleming took the pike to Fins and Feathers, where it was weighed in and determined to be the heaviest pulled from Idaho's waters.

The U.S. record for largest pike is a 46-pound, 2-ouncer caught by Peter Dubuc in the Sacandaga Reservoir in New York state in 1940.

Fleming believes his pike was about 8 years old. He said had it been caught in the spring, it would have been filled with eggs and weighed a few pounds more.

"As far as I can find out, it could be the third-largest pike caught in the U.S.," he said.

Fleming landed it with a black SilStar rod that he called an antique that was about 30 years old.

"This is what I caught it on," he said Friday as he proudly displayed the vintage rod. "I bought it when I was in the Navy in California."

The Coeur d'Alene native, who retired from the Navy after a 21-year career, said while cleaning a pike is about as easy as cleaning a deer, it's worth it because it of the taste.

"Some people compare it to lobster," he said.

While he was excited about his record catch, there was a downside that left Fleming pondering future fishing challenges.

"I can't go down to the dock at Fernan and expect to catch something bigger," he said. "How can I better it?"