A rather legendary one here in NH that worked the Alton Bay of Lake Winni area took it upon himself to train his Lab to sniff out LL Salmon. They are not allowed to be kept if caught through the ice - closed season. Actually, they aren’t supposed to be even brought up out of the hole. Pretty common poach as they are relatively easy to hook up with through the ice and there isn’t much technique to it. Drop a live smelt through a hole 2 feet under the ice pretty much anywhere on the lake at any depth and you have as good a chance at hooking up with one as anything else in the lake. And they get pretty big. It can be a tough line-cut for many when you’ve been putting in hours in tough weather getting skunked, then you see that big silver side under the hole.
Guy I knew got pinched. The Connie Cop shows up at his shanty for a routine license check, has his dog, enters shanty, dog starts doing his thing and sniffing all around the hole and saying ‘salmon’. Dog can smell and differentiate the smell of salmon ‘residue’/slime/scale/etc’ on the ice and around the hole. Asks the guy if he caught a salmon. Guy lies and says he didn’t. It’s in the trunk of his car on the side of the road maybe 150 yards away. Dog gets on the scent, presumably from the fish dripping while it was carried to the car across snow-topped ice, proceeds to the vehicle, and starts tapping at the trunk. Cop ID’s the car as this guy’s car. Makes him pop the trunk, voila - there’s the salmon. Dude got whacked with some stiff fines and extended license loss, but it probably would have been worse for him had he not been a full-time member of the fire department.
