Stephanie Migawa knows how to punch up a 20th anniversary celebration.
Her family limited on coho and a nearly 20-pound brown trout last Wednesday on the Long Gone 3 charters out of Waukegan.
“I just kept pulling and pulling,” Migawa said of the brown. “It’s the biggest fish I’ve ever caught. I don’t go out to fish very often.”
“It was roughly 19 pounds, just under 20, and was 34 inches,” Capt. Jim Goebel said. “It came on a downrigger, 19 feet, with a gold blank copper spoon from SeaQuest.”
The brown was caught off Great Lakes Naval Base in 40 feet.
“The wife caught all the big fish all the day long,” Goebel said.
Migawa, who works for the Department of Defense, and her husband Tony were celebrating their anniversary and “drove up for the day to do a fishing trip.”
I would say drove in, since they came from Blue Grass, Iowa, just west of the Quad Cities.
“If you ever stopped at the World’s Largest Truckstop on I-80, we’re six miles from there,” she said.
Within a day, Tony smoked some of the brown to eat.
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.
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