According to McCullough, a part-time landscaper, he truly believed he caught a brown trout. A whopper. Heck, it had to be one of the biggest brownies ever nabbed in Vermont.
Using a fly fashioned by his granddad, Al Lawson, he hooked a beauty weighing in at 9 ½ pounds and measuring 31 ½ inches long.
“I watched that fish for, oh, maybe two hours,’’ recalled McCullough, noting how his catch was among “hundreds, maybe thousands’’ of brown trout teeming in the water that afternoon. “It took some time, but I got him.’’
By early evening, McCullough had the prized catch tucked away in a freezer at his cousin’s house, and over the next few days he called around to local taxidermists and made plans to spend the $390 to have the great fish mounted.
“It was too long to fit in my freezer,’’ said McCullough, who lives in Bethel, slightly northeast of Rutland. “I wanted it flat, you know, for a good mount.’’
But then the law came looking for McCullough and his fish. He wasn’t chased down with guns, pepper spray, and handcuffs, but a radio tracking device that homed in on the fish. Law enforcement also had a picture of McCullough holding his catch. Beaming over what he caught, McCullough submitted a photo to the Herald of Randolph, which promptly published it, and it soon went over the Internet.
For a guy with a dream to become a professional outdoor guide, he figured the publicity could only boost his professional aspirations.
With the picture as evidence, and equipped with a radio receiver that detected a pinging device surgically implanted in the fish’s belly, Vermont game warden Keith Gallant showed up at the doorstep of McCullough’s cousin’s home, asking for a look at the fish.
In short order, said McCullough, Gallant identified the catch as a federally protected anadromous Atlantic salmon, a species that became endangered almost overnight when mills and dams sprung up along the Connecticut River late in the 19th century. Once the waterways were clogged, the salmon no longer could return from the Atlantic to spawn.
