Daniel Salter and a friend were ice fishing on Curwensville Lake in Cambria County when they saw two men crash through the ice. One pulled himself out of the frigid water but the other was wildly splashing, struggling to climb out while wearing a backpack.
"I helped him get the pack off," said Salter. "I grabbed his arms and said, 'When I pull, you kick your feet with all you got."
Both shivering men made it off the ice and into a warm car. While thanking Salter for probably saving his life, the guy with the backpack said his rescuer was due for some good karma.
A week later karma struck.
Salter, of St. Marys in Elk County, was in Armstrong County fishing through 8 inches of good ice on his first visit to Keystone Power Dam. After several hours of nothing, the flag on his tip-up tripped.
"I could tell it was a big fish," he said. "The line was really going out. I waited until it stopped and I set the hook."
Salter expected panfish but had rigged for bigger prey with 15-pound line, a single hook and a 3-4 inch shiner. For 15 to 20 minutes he reeled the tip-up spool, trying to prevent the line from being cut on sharp ice on the edges of the hole.
"When it got nearer and swam past, I could see how big it was," he said. "I wondered if we could get it through."
Without augering a second opening in the ice, Salter and his friend wrangled the 45 1/2 -inch, 25-pound tiger muskie onto the ice.
"We ice fish all over the place, all the lakes," he said. "I never dreamed I'd catch something like that."
After snapping a few photos and slapping a few high-fives, Salter slid the big fish back into the water.
Although most muskie hunters practice catch-and-release, the minimum harvest size for muskellunge and tiger muskies is 40 inches. A Fish and Boat management report says it takes eight years for a tiger to grow that big.
Tiger muskies are the hybrid, typically sterile offspring of a male Northern pike and female muskellunge. They are conceived in Fish and Boat Commission hatcheries in Union City, Tionesta and Pleasant Mount.
Tigers usually don't grow as big as muskies, but they grow faster and are more likely to be caught than their purebred parents. From 2001-2012, the agency stocked 81,839 fingerling tiger muskies in lakes and rivers throughout Pennsylvania.
