Retiree Catches Pending State-Record Chinook Salmon from His Pontoon

Two Montana couples went out for a leisurely day of salmon trolling on Fort Peck Lake on Aug. 9. Fishing aboard James and Nancy Fauth’s 25-year-old pontoon boat, Tony and Emily Simonsen were enjoying a bright and calm morning on the large reservoir. The only hitch was that none of them had caught a fish yet.

“But just after lunch my spinning rod came to life off a downrigger, and line peeled off the reel,” a 68-year-old James tells Outdoor Life. “I knew it was a salmon, because I’d been marking them deep on my sonar, and the hooked fish was so strong.”

James says that as the fish made one dogged run after another, he was just hoping the $29 Walmart rod-and-reel setup his Uncle Vern gifted him 15 years ago was up to the task. The original 20-pound line was still on the reel, and he’d only used it a few times before then.

As he battled the fish, Nancy cranked up the downrigger ball from 80 feet deep while Tony manned the landing net. Emily, meanwhile, recorded the action with her cell phone.

The video of the fight lasts less than four minutes, and it starts as James is already at work. He says he fought the salmon for about five minutes total, his rod bent into a tight bow the whole time.

James keeps saying in the video that he can tell it’s a big salmon, and probably the heaviest one he’s ever hooked. By the time he draws the fish close to where Tony can net it, the whole crew is stunned.

“Oh, my goodness!” Emily exclaims as the chinook (also known as a king salmon) flops into the pontoon. “It doesn’t even look real it’s so massive!”

After unhooking the salmon, which hit a green-and-white soft plastic squid lure trolled behind a blue-and-white dodger, James weighed the fish using a small hand scale.

“It read 33 pounds 9 ounces, so I figured it was a state record,” says James, a retired power company lineman who lives in Malta. “It wouldn’t fit in my livewell, so we put it in a cooler with ice, then went back to fishing. I was hoping we’d catch another salmon. So, we went back to trolling in 130 feet of water about a mile or so from the dam, looking for another chinook.”

By 5 p.m. they still hadn’t caught another salmon, so they headed back to Fort Peck Marina to try and weigh the fish. The marina didn’t have a certified scale, and neither did a nearby convenience store. Luckily, the clerk was willing to help and he contacted Steve Dalbey, a regional fisheries program manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Dalbey spoke with James and they made a plan to meet at the Reynolds Market in Glasgow at 7 p.m.

Once there, the chinook kept maxing out the market’s small scales. Finally, a staff member found a big enough scale for the fish, which weighed 32.62 pounds. It measured 38 inches long with an astonishing 28-inch girth.

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James has not been officially notified by the state that his record catch has been certified. But he’s certain the catch will top the previous state record of 32.05 pounds, caught by Greg Haug in 2020. That fish also came from Fort Peck, which is home to a population of landlocked chinook thanks to continued stocking efforts by MFWP.

“Dalbey told me my salmon is definitely the new record, and he signed all the paperwork and submitted it to the state.”

James is having his salmon mounted by Northern Anglers Taxidermy in Billings. But he didn’t have a large enough cooler to deliver the frozen fish to them, so he made one himself out of Styrofoam and wood.

“It’ll be over a year before I get the fish back from the taxidermist,” James says. “I decided to hang it in my friend Tony’s River’s Bend Assisted living center that he owns in Malta. I think the folks there might enjoy seeing it hanging on a wall, and it’s close enough that I can go over and look at it whenever I want.”