Prize catch Old Town student wins multiple awards for meticulously mounted pickerel

“Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped.”

– “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau

An extra-credit project for English class has landed unexpected rewards for the Old Town High School student who crafted it.

Not only did Dan Dykstra’s meticulously mounted pickerel net him a 100 in the class, but he won six awards earlier this month for the 3-foot-tall display at the 26th annual State of Maine Sportsman’s Show in Augusta.

As an English class project to depict a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” Dykstra artfully mounted a 23-inch pickerel he caught earlier this year in Stetson. He used the same ice-fishing trap, complete with orange flag sticking up. A half-inch piece of Plexiglas, the kind used as the upper barrier around hockey rinks, became the ice. Driftwood attached to particleboard, with peat moss and craft store grass added as details, suggested the underwater habitat.

The striking presentation was a natural for Dykstra, whose father owns and operates Northland Taxidermy in Alton.

“I was skinning out animals with him when I was 5,” the 15-year-old high school junior recollected. “I’d tell him to get off my side, this was my side.”

Rosemary Canney, Dykstra’s English teacher at Old Town High, praised her student’s attention to detail. “Fish, when they die, they lose all color,” Canney explained, pointing to the mounted pickerel now displayed in the classroom. “He airbrushed this all himself.”

Dykstra paints most of the brook trout for customers at his dad’s shop, but this was the first fish he had mounted and the first pickerel he had ever painted. His fish had lost all of its scales, so he drew them on by hand. He varnished everything under the ice to achieve a wet look. From the ice up, the wood and imitation grass appear dry.

Although math is his favorite subject, Dykstra says he enjoys English – just not all the forced reading. An honors student, he had a 94 in English when he began working on the extra-credit project. By the time he turned the project in, Dykstra already had gotten his grade up to a 98 and wasn’t even able to get the full five points on his final grade. The school’s grading system only goes up to 100. The extra-credit project had to be about something the class already had read and had to be approved by Canney.

“He’s phenomenally smart,” the teacher attested. “I try very hard to trip him up, but it’s very difficult.”

Since the class previously had studied Thoreau’s “Walden,” Dykstra chose to depict a scene where the men go to the river and catch pickerel and perch through the ice.

“I really like ice-fishing, so when I read that, it kind of stuck in my head,” he said.

Dykstra works at his dad’s shop as a hobby and as a handy source of income. His aim is to study mechanical engineering at the University of Maine.

Not only did the project earn him an A in English, he reeled in six trophies, plaques and ribbons in various categories at the Augusta sportsmen’s show. He was awarded the professional taxidermists’ choice trophy. He also took first in the novice division.

Looking back on the project, Dykstra says it involved more than 50 hours after school and on weekends, but the time was well spent.

“I knew it was going to be a long process,” he said. “It’s just something I like to do, so I didn’t mind working on it. It was a learning experience.”

Aimee Dolloff can be reached at 990-8130 and adolloff@bangordailynews.net.