There’s fish stories, then there is Matthew Lewandowski’s tale. The young man from Bartlett was fishing a jig and leech last Tuesday with a 5-foot ultralight rod on Separation Lake in Kenora, Ontario when he caught a 41-inch northern pike.
Nice enough, but the story, well, enjoy.
“I caught a very small northern and was bringing him in,” he texted his dad Shawn Lewandowski. “I got it to the boat and started lifting it out of the water to release and this massive northern comes out of nowhere and dolphin dives into the side of the boat and ate the little thing. It immediately started swimming straight down and I waited a good 30 seconds and then set the hook.”
He estimated it at a 10-minute fight.
Bonus points for using the term “dolphin dives.”
“His [maternal] grandpa [the late Randall Richard Petrbok] would be proud,” Shawn emailed. “Biggest fisherman I knew. Always wanted a 30-inch walleye, 40-inch northern and 50-inch musky. Only was able to get the walleye. He would always say, hey, `Did you see the FOTW?!?!”
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.
To make submissions, email (BowmanOutside@gmail.com) or contact me on Facebook (Dale Bowman), X (@BowmanOutside), Instagram (@BowmanOutside) or Bluesky (@BowmanOutside.bsky.social).