An ice fisherman fishing for pike in Minnesota got a surprise catch when he hooked a near-state-record muskie—an estimated 50-pounder—and, amazingly, managed to pull it through a tiny hole in the ice.

While fishing on Mille Lacs Lake on Feb. 22, Jason Birke captured video of Mark Kottke—“my neighbor on the ice”—landing the 54-inch muskie, also known as a muskellunge.

“This was the biggest fish I’d ever seen caught and is only a few inches from the state record,” Birke told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors, revealing the fish’s girth as 27 inches. “Truly amazing to witness in person.”

For comparison, the Minnesota state record for a caught-and-released muskellunge is 57 1/4 inches landed at Lake Vermilion on Aug. 6, 2019 by Corey Kitzmann of Davenport, Iowa. The state record for a muskie on a certified scale is 54 pounds caught at Lake Winnibigoshish in 1957. That fish was 56 inches long.

Kottke used what is called a tip-up, an ice fishing devise that suspends a bait in the water column through a hole in the ice and detects when a fish strikes. He was using a sucker for bait and 80-pound coated tip-up line, as he stated on Facebook.

So, rather than reeling the fishing up with a rod and reel, he pulled up the fish by hand through the 10-inch-wide hole.

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“The muskie was not the intended species, as the season is closed, and have never seen one through the ice,” Kottke said on Facebook.

He said the muskie was only out of the water for about a minute and half before he released it back into the lake.

“Mille Lacs is the land of giants because people continue with CPR: catch, photo, release,” he wrote.

As for Birke, he told For The Win Outdoors that he landed plenty of walleye that day, but the catch of the day belonged to Kottke.

Photos courtesy of ViralHog and Jason Birke.

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