You sure know the fishing has to be good when you set a pair of world records on a fishing trip, and neither fish stacks up as the best one of the week.

Yeah, that's right, two world records. And neither holds a candle to the big fish you were really after.

"Of all the things I've ever wanted to do over the 21 years we've had this business, this 10-pound brook trout was right at top of that list," said Carroll Ware of Skowhegan, who runs Fins and Furs Adventures with his wife, Lila, and is the proud owner of 20 world fly-fishing records.

The first week of July, Ware took a group to one of his favorite fishing haunts, Osprey Lake in Labrador, Canada. The brook trout there are very wild and very large, and Ware makes as many trips as he can there each year. Trout between 6 and 8 pounds are there to be had with some regularity, but Ware has long suspected there were some far larger than that.

The first day in, Ware and a client were working in a little outlet off Osprey, and Ware hooked into a pretty good fish. He estimated it to be somewhere around 7 pounds, but he and the rest of us will never know for sure.

That fish snapped his line off.

So with dusk now an envelope surrounding Osprey, the group made time for a few more casts. And Ware hit into another formidable finned foe.

"I used a White Wulff," Ware recalled. "I made three casts, and on the last one the fish took all of my fly line and, oh, probably another 30-40 feet of backing. He never came up to the surface, and I never saw him.

"It was the end of day, about 6 (p.m.), and the light was getting pretty low. We got him into net, and we weighed him with the net and all."

And they weighed the fish again. And again. And yet again, just for good measure.

When it was all said and done, the fish clocked in at a (ahem!) healthy 10 pounds, 4 ounces.

"We weighed him four times," Ware said. "Then I just held him in water until he was ready to go. That was the other part of that whole thing -- I really just wanted to see a 10-pound brook trout swim in the water. I was at a loss for words when he did.

"I got pretty emotional over that fish. I guess I don't expect people to understand that."

I suspect most of us understand it perfectly well. There's big fish, and then there's 10-pound brookies.

"I knew I had a big fish on, but because we hadn't seen him, I thought maybe he was 8 pounds or something," Ware said. "I looked at him when he got to the net, and I never said anything to anyone until we weighed him. I wanted to know for sure."

And that was just how the trip started.

Over the next few days, Ware would hook into a pair of trophy fish that were small in comparison to the 10-pounder. The first of his world records came with a 22-inch brook trout that he estimated weighed 6 or 7 pounds, and he later landed a 23-inch brookie that was a pound or two heavier, a second world record. The first fish was caught on a 2-pound test tippet to qualify it as a record holder, while the second was on a 20-pound test tippet.

Because they are catch-and-release records, the brookies were recorded in inches and not pounds.

"Both of those fish are still swimming," Ware said. "Both are still healthy. That's why I'm only after catch-and-release records now."

Ware's work was an omen. A few days after catching the 10-pounder, it was officially announced that Ware's Fins and Furs Adventures would be the sole outfitter booking reservations for Osprey Lake Lodge.

Harvey Packard of Eustis was among the first to reap those benefits. He caught a brookie in Osprey weighing 11 pounds.

"There are four, five, six or eight fish I know of that are 10 pounds or over that have been caught and released there this year," Ware said.

Well, he ought to know.

"And, I'm telling you, they're getting bigger. They're getting bigger every year."

Travis Barrett -- 621-5648

tbarrett@centralmaine.com