GARRISON, Minn. — Thirteen-year-old David Jacobson of Garrison, Minn., had already caught a 57-inch muskie — when he was 8.

Last Saturday, the Jacobson guys took the boat over to Yellow Lake in Burnett County, Wis., to see if someone could catch a lake sturgeon larger than David’s muskie.

Oh, my, did they.

David, with plenty of help, caught a sturgeon that ranks among some of the largest ever taken in Wisconsin. The leviathan measured 86 inches long.

Nobody will ever know how much it weighed. The Jacobson clan released the fish and watched it swim back into the depths of Yellow Lake, between Danbury and Siren in northwestern Wisconsin. No girth measurement was taken.

Serious muskie anglers, the Jacobson gang had never been fishing for sturgeon before, said David’s dad, Erik Jacobson.

“It was the first time we ever tried for them, as crazy as that sounds,” he said. “We had all the gear. It was just a matter of changing the tackle at the end of the line.”

Also along that day were Erik’s dad, David Jacobson of Isle, Minn., and young David’s brother, Noah, 10.

The half-hour battle to bring the fish aboard Erik’s 20-foot Ranger included high drama when the sturgeon wrapped David’s line around the anchor chain.

For perspective on the size of this fish, the Wisconsin state record lake sturgeon — also caught in Yellow Lake, in 1979, was 79 inches long. It weighed 170 pounds, 10 ounces. The largest Wisconsin sturgeon taken by spearing was 84.2 inches long and weighed 212 pounds.

Minnesota’s record lake sturgeon, taken on the Kettle River in 1994, was 70 inches long and weighed 94 pounds, 4 ounces.

Ryan Koenigs, co-chairman of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ sturgeon team, said estimating the weight of big sturgeon based on their length is difficult.

“I’d have a hard time putting a weight on it,” Koenigs said. “We have 80-inch fish that might range from 130 to 250-plus pounds.”

THE FIGHT BEGINS

It was about 5 p.m. when the big sturgeon took a wad of nightcrawlers impaled on a 5/0 hook fished on the bottom in an area where the Jacobsons had seen a few sturgeon caught by other anglers.

David was first up to reel in a fish. Initially, his dad took the rod and set the hook when he heard the bait-casting reel clicking. The reel was spooled with braided muskie line and a 40-pound-test monofilament leader.

“It didn’t feel that big to begin with,” young David said. “But this was our first time sturgeon fishing. We had no idea how they fight or, by all means, how the big ones fight.”

That soon changed.

“I thought the rod was going to come flying out of my hands,” he said. “My grandpa evidently thought so, too, because he loosened the drag. That definitely helped.”

Erik made a move to pull up the anchor, but he was too late. The fish already had wrapped the line around it.

“I could feel him making a run,” Erik said. “I just fed him the anchor line. I have a 28-pound anchor. He took that thing and ran with it. It’s amazing the line didn’t break.”

After David had gained back some line, Erik brought the anchor up and extricated it from the fishing line. He feared the fish would be gone, but as he played out line by hand, he could feel that it was still there.

“I told David to reel as fast as he could, and the fight was back on,” Erik said.

The fight lasted about half an hour, Erik said. Several times, the sturgeon appeared near the boat. At one point, the 7-foot creature surfaced and rolled. On one pass near the boat, the fish tried to leap from the water, David said.

“It lunged out of the water but only got halfway out,” he said. “Then my brother started screaming, ‘It’s a shark!’ At that time, we knew it was a behemoth.”

HOW TO LAND A STURGEON

Getting the fish in the boat would prove difficult. The Jacobsons had a big muskie net ready.

“I tried to net it,” Erik said. “I got about three-fourths of the fish in the net. That was all I could get. I told Dad to take the net. I dived for the tail. It was jerking me around something fierce. We finally got the whole fish in the net. Then we didn’t know what to do with it.”

The fish was too big, too heavy and too slippery to lift aboard. Anglers in another boat suggested tail-roping the sturgeon — slipping a noose of rope over the tail — and hauling it in over the stern, which was lower to the water.

“We took their advice,” Erik said.

Erik tail-roped the fish, and — with a gulp — released it from the net. He swung it around to the stern, where he and his dad used the rope to haul the monster onto the stern casting platform.

“I held it down by the head,” Erik said. “I didn’t want it thrashing around.”

The Jacobsons were beside themselves.

“There was so much yelling and screaming and excitement,” Erik said.

They used a tape measure to arrive at the fish’s 86-inch length.

Sturgeon anglers in a nearby boat came by and offered to weigh the fish using their on-board scale. That didn’t work. The fish was so long that part of it never came off the boat’s floor.

So, the Jacobsons took the fish and released it into the lake.

Because the fish was not weighed on a certified scale, it won’t be considered for a Wisconsin record.

Erik Jacobson has pursued having the fish listed as a world record in the catch-and-release category of the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, where the current record is an 84-inch fish, taken from Yellow Lake in 2001.

But Emmett Brown, executive director of the hall of fame, said the fish won’t be considered for a record because two anglers handled the rod on which it was caught. Hall of Fame rules require a fish to be played by just one angler.

The Jacobsons can live with that.

“The experience was priceless,” Erik said.

Wisconsin’s hook-and-line sturgeon harvest season on Yellow Lake and several other specified waters runs from Sept. 6 to Sept. 30. The limit is one fish in possession.