It actually happened to me when I caught my PB a week and a half after ice out. Similar situation, different bait. I had made up a spinnerbait and I tied a rabbit (zonker) strip on for a trailer and I wanted to see the action of the rabbit strip in the water.
I threw into an area where I knew there were some last year's weeds. I was reeling in and trying a new retrieve technique I read about over the winter. Snag. I'm thinking that there is no way those weeds are that thick. As with most spinnerbaits, you generally can reel right through the weeds, which I did. On the next cast, same thing only this time I figured I'd rip it out of the weeds to see how thick those weeds were. The bait wouldn't budge, what seemed like 30 seconds later, I felt the tail of the fish trying to swim off.
So now I'm thinking that the weeds are to thick to pull the fish through, so I decided to ease up on the drag to let the fish swim out of the weeds and then I'll put the spurs to her. As soon as the fish felt like she was out of the weeds, the game was on.
As it turned out, the fish was 8.5 lbs, and there were no weeds. I thought I was good enough to know the difference between snagging weeds, timber etc and large fish, but what I learned that day was: when in doubt, set the hook, it just could be a trophy fish!
BTW, that homemade spinnerbait never saw water again.
