Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Unusual catches while fishing?

best catch and release, less headaches.

Best friend caught a drowned man that the Coast Guard had giving up looking for , many years ago .

Broadwater Marina central Biloxi , where Pirates Coves Casino was before Hurricane Katrina .

Wolf fish in PWS, scariest looking sucker I’d ever seen brought up on a line.


Add me to the folks that have caught a gull while fishing for Pike in lake Minchumina

Nothing too unusual for me, but some memorable stuff...

Caught a few of what they call "scorpion fish" down in Guaymas when I was much younger. Said to have poisonous spines, and we'd just cut the line. Caught about a 3-foot hammerhead down there.

Once caught a snapping turtle out of the Rio Grande down at Black Gap. I cut the line and let him keep my hook.

Once while trolling for sand bass with my father-in-law on Lake Kiowa with a slab, we went into a turn and the slab must have sank because I caught a nice catfish. That wasn't at all expected. Crappie fishing at that lake was sometimes exceptional...one day we caught nearly 100 crappie.

When I was about ten years old we'd fish Doane Pond near Mt. Palomar in southern California. Long time ago but it seems like most of the fish were rainbow trout. One day I saw a fellow catch a stringer of fish that had gotten away from somebody. As I recall all the fish on the stringer were still alive.

I guess I'm not that great a fisherman...can't come up with any spectacular lies.

Jig fishing below a dam on a float on the Mighty Mississippi, I hooked something that fought like hell in the current.

Finally got it to the surface ready to net, and it was just an old boot.

I thought that only happened in the cartoons......

Doane Pond,

Now there's a name I haven't heard in ages.

Being a commercial fisherman by trade I've caught a lot of different things a couple of the notables. While I was trolling for kingfisher I snagged a square grouper while bugging and dang near got pulled out of the boat. I was visiting a friend that moved from Florida to NC to manage a trout farm. So after closing time we went to get us some trout. I had a 15' cast net and made one throw and tucked the net when it hit the water and still couldn't lift the net. Figured out real quick that a 2 - 3lb trout will gill off in a 2" mullet net.

Was scuba diving and see a Northern swimming around, and not thinking anything about it I see a fishing pole. I think cool, this looks like it hasn't been here long and then it starts pulling like crazy and start pulling me. I reeled it in to the end of the pole and cut the line, gave the pole to a kid on shore.

I caught a muir in Southeast Alaska with my downrigger set at 70 feet so with the blow back I would imagine it was around 65 feet down

Holy Crap! That beak looks like it could do some real damage.

Friend of mine caught a railroad spike once while we were fishing in the Duluth harbor. Hook snagged in a rust scale and it stayed on all the way to the boat.

Jerry

When it’s comes to fishing shirt happens. We have a term for it FM it stands for effing magic. It’s the only explanation

Did it jump any??

Coolest one for me this year, seeing a good size thresher crash the spread while trolling for tuna.

Watching that tail slice through the water, getting bigger and longer as it approaches to the point of near absurdity, only to see it wielded like some pelagic bullwhip, was beyond cool.

Now I have to catch one.

Yesterday on the river we stop for lunch and a customer peeled his skin off his chicken and put the chicken in tinfoil to warm and placed in the pizza oven in the drift boat. He threw the chicken skin in the river and an hour later and a 3/4 mile down the river we caught his piece of chicken skin while drift fishing for Steelhead. FM

Size 13, couldn't quite clear the water.....

Let's see, nothing really "strange" but a lot that was unexpected. A few turtles here and there of course. I grew up near a tidal creek in eastern VA and as kids we used to dip-net herring, the roe is a delicacy. During the day, herring was all we'd catch but at night on a high tide, no telling what would come in. We caught herring of course, white shad, smelt, catfish, eels, and the occasional chain pickerel and largemouth bass. That was a lot of fun for a kid.

Probably 20 years ago I was surf fishing in Frisco NC. We were catching pan-sized whiting, good eating. Then I hooked something that was not a whiting. Couldn't do a thing with it, it was huge. It started down the beach and all I could do was follow. I had a pretty stout rod, a big Penn spinning reel, and 30-lb. test and I had that thing on for 45 minutes. Being at the beach during summer, a crowd gathered, probably 75 people. Everybody had an opinion about what it was--big cobia, shark, and so on. But the way it sat down on the bottom, my buddy and I knew it was a big ray. It settled down about a hundred yards off the beach and I couldn't budge it, definitely couldn't bring it in so I handed the rod to my buddy, and borrowed a boogie board and mask. The water was pretty clear so I wanted to paddle out and at least get a look at it.

So I got almost out to it, reached down and grabbed the line to pull it up and see where it went and that was all she wrote. I must have spooked it good because it popped the line without even thinking about slowing down.

We caught a 671 Detroit diesel engine in the Mississippi Sound when I was a teenager. Technically we were shrimping and got hung up real bad. One of the gas wells we were working around sent down a diver. He radioed back and said he didn't have to unhang us since it wasn't rig property, but for a basket of crabs still in the net, he could help us out. He got us loose with minimal damage. We sent him back to the rig with a couple baskets of crabs and a basket of very fresh shrimp. The engine belonged to a shrimp boat that sunk in a fire some years back.

A sealed 55 gallon drum with a body inside. Lake was low, barrel was exposed with a hazardous materials label. We reported it to the Game Warden. He took over with other law enforcement. They discovered the body inside.

Snapping turtle while bottom fishing, N.Pike while reeling in a bluegill, Seagull on a plug.

BTW, Those damn seagulls are frigging mean!

When I was a kid, we used to spend part of the summer with family in Camden, ME, and would regularly catch dogfish while fishing for stripers in Penobscot Bay. One day I hooked a dogfish and when it was about 10' from the boat a shark that looked nearly as big as our skiff came out of nowhere and bit the dogfish in half. I don't think that anyone would have believed us if we hadn't kept the front half of the dogfish. Scared the crap out of me.