WAYNE – Come Sunday, anglers Jason Voye and his 9-year-old son Ethan, both of Wayne, hope to break Maine’s northern pike record while competing in the Belgrade Ice Fishing Derby on Belgrade Lakes.

They figure they’ve got a good shot at it since Jason Voye caught a 24-pound, 41-inch pike while ice fishing on Dec. 28 on the Androscoggin River in Turner.

That pike was 7 pounds shy of the state record, which was a 31-pound, 1-ounce mega-fish caught in 1998 in North Pond in Belgrade.

It took Voye, 33, a Hallowell chef, 15 minutes to land the Androscoggin fish, which had a girth of 21 inches. Just getting it up through a 10-inch hole in 10 inches of ice over water 8 feet deep was a struggle.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams there’d be a fish that big in the river,” Jason Voye said Thursday while looking at the mounted monster hanging from his living room wall.

Actually, there shouldn’t be a fish that big in the river. State biologist Francis Brautigam said that someone illegally introduced the pike at the boat landing or in Gulf Island Pond. That, or someone illegally tossed it and probably others into Bear Pond, or more likely, Lake Umbagog, the Androscoggin’s headwater, and it migrated downriver.

“For around here, it’s one of the deepest, fattest ones I’ve seen,” said taxidermist Sonny Moore, owner of Pond Town Taxidermy Studio in Winthrop. “The Androscoggin River has been giving up some really nice pike.”

Voye took his prize catch to Moore, who mounted it on a driftwood board. It was the only wood he had that would fit the fish.

“To catch a fish of that size is quite a trophy. My wife doesn’t like it up on that wall, but I had to do it, because I’ve never caught a fish that big in my life,” Voye said.

Like it was yesterday, Jason and Ethan vividly recalled the foggy December day when Jason landed the big pike.

They set up to catch pickerel and bass using regular ice fishing traps and 8-pound monofilament line. Within an hour, something started snapping off their fishing lines.

“We didn’t know what was in there,” Ethan said.

They switched to 30-pound line, bigger hooks and 10- to 12-inch red-fin shiner baitfish that Voye got from a bait dealer.

A catch-and-release angler, Voye said he doesn’t like to use steel leaders because they cut into a fish’s jaw and injure it. Using heavy monofilament line is also more challenging.

First, Ethan landed a 19-pound pike. Then, at about 9:30 a.m., Jason said he felt slack line. He started reeling it in, then suddenly felt a lot of weight on the line.

“He had run out so much line he was laying on the bottom eating that fish, and I said to Ethan, ‘Oh, my God! I’ve got a monster!'”

At one point, both looked down the hole and saw nothing but one really big pike gliding past.

“It took half a minute for that fish to cross the bottom of the hole. All you saw is fish,” Jason Voye said.

Ethan said, “It was about as big as me. When I saw it go past the hole, I said to dad, ‘This is a huge one! I can’t believe it! Don’t lose it!'”

With something that big, Jason Voye said he knew he had to finesse it, tire it out, rather than try to fight it. Still, the pike took 100 feet of line out on four runs before tiring.

When he finally got the pike’s foot-long head up in the hole, Voye said he reached his neoprene-gloved hand down past the 8-inch-wide gaping maw filled with razor-sharp teeth, grabbed its gills and pulled. And pulled, and pulled.

Once the pike popped free of the hole, he said he and Ethan romped excitedly around, screaming like children for a while before taking the fish to Moore’s.

“A lot of guys pay big bucks to go up to Canada to catch these fish and they’re right here in our backyard,” Jason Voye said.