“I guess it doesn’t surprise me because I’ve seen reports of all these huge fish that have been caught,” said Tom Heinrich, the DNR’s fisheries area supervisor for Mille Lacs.
That coincided with the coming into adulthood of a particularly brutish breed of muskies - the Leech Lake strain - that have been steadily stocked in Mille Lacs since 1989. In the 2000s, specialized muskie fishing, with lines up to 100-pound test and rods with strong backbones that flung lures the size of a large man’s boot, exploded in popularity among a hardy subset of anglers. The state began sporadically stocking Mille Lacs - a massive central Minnesota lake of some 132,500 acres - in 1969, providing a beastly alternative to its famed walleye. Numerous fish that surely would have given the record a run for its money have been caught, measured, photographed and video recorded, but ultimately released alive before being weighed on a certified scale - meaning the biggun from “Big Winnie” held firm in the record books. The idea that Minnesota-record-breaking fish have been lurking in Mille Lacs - and other large Minnesota lakes such as Lake Vermilion - is no surprise to those who have flogged the waters in search of giant muskies for decades.
(The official world record recognized by most organizations - Louis Spray’s 69-pound, 11-ounce muskie - was caught on the Chippewa Flowage in northwestern Wisconsin, but that was 1949, a different era - and one steeped in muskie-record controversy.) Few doubted the 1957 record would fall, but nonetheless, Sprengeler’s muskie will likely serve as indisputable evidence to cement Minnesota’s place among the modern monster muskie fishing destinations in America.
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