Hanging from a dock with his wife holding his ankles, Kevin Lee suddenly realized that if he lost the big fish she was playing, he would become far better acquainted with the frigid waters of Lake Michigan.

“I knew right then I had better not mess it up,” Lee said. “I didn’t take a net, so I had to hang head down off the dock with her holding my ankles to keep me from falling in while I got hold of the fish.”

But the significance of Theresa Lee’s catch didn’t become clear until her husband yanked the fish onto the dock and realized it wasn’t a lake trout but a splake, a hybrid that had a female lake trout mother and a brook trout father.

And not only was it a splake, it turned out to be a state-record splake. At 17.44 pounds, it broke the record of 16.25 by more than a pound.

The Lees live in Rapid River in the Upper Peninsula, where they own Sal Mar Resort with his brother Ken. It had been too windy to launch a boat on Lake Michigan, so Ken and Theresa decided to fish from shore. They picked the harbor at Fayette State Park on the Garden Peninsula, where deep water comes up to the bluffs.

Theresa Lee was throwing a Kastmaster spoon with yellow feathers when something hit her lure “and headed for Green Bay,” her husband said. She was using a rod and reel rigged with eight-pound line.

“I knew it wasn’t a walleye,” she said. “We thought it might be a splake, because we have a good splake fishery here in spring, but when I got it in where we could see it a couple of times, it was so big we thought it had to be a lake trout.”

The only problem with owning a fishing resort is that it doesn’t leave them much time to fish.

“When you do get a chance to go, it’s like, ‘See ya! We’re gone,’ “Theresa Lee said. “That’s why we went shore fishing that night when it was too windy to go out on the lake.”

It took 30 minutes to tire the fish enough that Kevin Lee could land it.

The American Indian name for splake is “wendigo.” Some fish books say the cross does not occur in nature and is produced only in fish hatcheries, but the number of lakes named Wendigo and Windigo suggests that Indians knew the species long before hatcheries existed.

Unlike many hybrids, splake are fertile and can reproduce, but they tend to blend back into the original lake and brook trout populations over the years, and most splake caught in Michigan are released by hatcheries.

Splake are a delicious food fish, and anglers also like them for their game qualities. They seem to inherit the fighting ability of their smaller brook trout parent and the size potential of their more lethargic lake trout parent.

Because they prefer cold water, many splake are caught in open water in early spring and late fall, and even more are probably caught by ice fishermen, when the in-shore waters have cooled to the temperatures the fish like.

As for Theresa Lee’s splake, it will be mounted and placed in a prominent position at the resort, where it can be admired by anyone who comes by. But it will be a case of look and don’t touch.

“I’m having it put in a glass case,” she said. “I’m not taking any chances on someone damaging it.”