News Photo by Grace Waker Big Brownie, a 21 inch brown trout, was caught for the second time in 52 years on Monday during the Michigan Brown Trout Festival.

ALPENA– Alpena’s unicorn “Big Brownie” was caught for the second time in the history of the Brown Trout Festival on Monday, July 20.

“It’s a pretty wild feeling,” Scott Wade, this year’s Big Brownie catcher said. “Just out there trying to catch walleye and we end up with a brown trout and it’s the tagged one. It’s an amazing feeling.”

Wade said him and his son Ryder were out fishing in the Thunder Bay near Sulphur Island. The original plan was to fish further north, but the wind kept them in the bay, Wade said.

“Once we put it (Big Brownie) in the boat and seen the tag, I started shaking pretty bad,” Wade said.

Wade and his son won $6,352 for catching the fish. The prize is from the Big Brownie Progressive Pot, a pot of money that has been building since 2022.

Fishing Tournament Director Brad McNeill said he had a good feeling about Big Brownie being caught this year.

“It was roughly just south of Mischley’s Hole,” McNeill said. “That’s where a lot of people fish.

“He just migrated a little bit farther south towards Sulfur Island.”

Each year, McNeill meets with Jerry Kahn, the owner of Cedar Brook Trout Farm and Kahn’s son James Glazier. On July 16 the fish was tagged and released in Shin-Ga-Ba Shores, a park in Ossineke.

The three men chose one of three fish in a tank, placed it on a wet towel, and tagged its jaw and back using two zip ties.

McNeill then went off to place Big Brownie somewhere in Lake Huron. No one goes out with him so as to keep the location a secret.

This tradition started decades ago, despite “Big Brownie” only being caught twice in the entire history of the festival.

This year marks the 52nd year of the Brown Trout Festival. The festival started in 1975, when the population of brown trout was thriving. Every year since the start of the festival, anglers have gathered to catch brown trout, lake trout, steelhead and more in a series of competitions for ten days.

In the first two years of the tournament, Big Brownie would come from Lake Huron. Festival organizers would spend their time fishing a brown trout, tagging it and then releasing it back into the water.

McNeill said that process started taking too long as the population of brown trout shrunk. According to The News, when invasive species like zebra and quagga mussels started taking over Lake Huron, it wiped out alewives, the food that brown trout rely on.

Tournament organizers turned to a new source three years into the tournament. That source was Cedar Brook Trout Farm, a small fish farm in Harrisville.

“We raise rainbow, brook, and brown trout, and we raise them for stocking private and public waters throughout the state of Michigan for kids’ fishing days, sportsman’s clubs, fishing associations, and so forth all over the state,” Kahn said.

Cedar Brook Trout Farms not only supplies “Big Brownie,” it also stocks the pools for the kids’ tournament and Thunder Bay with brown trout. McNeill said between one to 4,000 brown trout are stocked into the lake for the festival, depending on the amount of money the festival has.

McNeill said brown trout do not thrive in the lake as much as they used to. According to the DNR’s Fish Stocking Database, the state stocked thousands of brown trout in Thunder Bay multiple times a year from 1979 until 2011.

McNeill said after that point, the DNR decided the species were not thriving in the lake like they used to and stopped stocking the lake altogether. In 2012, Cedar Brook Trout Farms took over the job.

“They’ve (the DNR) figured that the catch rate wasn’t too good, so we don’t get (brown trout) from the DNR anymore,” McNeill said. “We actually had to raise the entry fee, $10 out of a weekly entry fee…goes towards fish stocking, and we buy them from Jerry.

“We’re only planting a couple thousand every year, but it seems to be working.”

According to The News, only two brown trout made the leaderboard during last year’s tournament.

“We’re hoping the promise of that big fish out there is exciting to people,” Kahn said.