Home Forums Fishing Freshwater Strange catches

Striped burrfish. Weird bugger for sure. Caught on a Clouser fishing for Redfish. A bit of a disappointment. 😁

When I was a kid a bunch of us were camped out on the Fourche river north of town. We were drinking pretty heavy and decided we would fish a little with night crawlers. One of the guys caught what we thought was a 2 1/2 pound catfish. He swung it around and landed it on the bank and it raised up on 4 legs and ran down the bank and jumped back in. He pulled it back out and we shined a light on it and it was a huge salamander. We cut the line and let it go. It was an Ozark Hellbender. Protected species and rare. I have seen one other one in my life. It scared the heck out of us when the catfish took off on 4 legs in the moonlight.

Never caught one but I've seen hellbenders in Wva trout fishing a few times. Kinda wild looking, one evening at dark we were leaving and a friend of mine picked up his stringer with a hellbender hanging off one of his trout.

clam - Like the above, I figure that it was open and the hook dragged across it.

set of various-sized rusty tin cans all wired together - We figured that they had once been attached to the car of some newly-weds. Thought I really had something the way it fought coming in.

dead carp (mud-encrusted) - I had spun up a bait-caster with a red and white Dardevle attached to the line. When it settled to the bottom as I un-nested the reel, it must have dropped right on the open mouth of the carp.

I didn't know what it was but I saw several hellbenders in Mississippi years ago. I was pretty freaked out. It was years before I found out what they were.

I never found much. However, I fish a lake called Lake Winnebago and fish the south end . A man that fished it all his life , lives in Fond Du Lac ,one day pulled something up to find it was a flintlock muzzleloader . The wood was almost all rotten but the steel was in one piece.. The flint was still stuck in it . Not sure but was likely there for 200 yrs. I think you can google up the picture .

Pretty cool story . It was on half cock and likely was ready to shoot it.

Trolling a bottom-bouncer for walleyes and thought I snagged. But it started to come up and ended up being about a 30 pound log. The log had someone else's broken off rig on it. So I unhooked it off the log to keep it. Started rolling up at he line that was attached to the rig so some critter wouldn't get tangled up in it. Kept rolling and rolling and rolling then here comes the end guide of a nice Shakespeare rod & Shimano reel up out of the water.

They both cleaned up well and I still have and use them to this day.

Look at the barrel length on that thing.

Rubber on a downriver. Big fight....lol

I think they "fished", clams on the Mississippi River for buttons.

Some of these really funny.

I was surf fishing for steelhead last weekend and had a seagull fly into one of my lines and get slightly tangled. Seagull went into the water still tangled and I started swinging my rod tip around trying to free him. Eventually things unraveled and he flew off and I kept fishing.

Catching birds starting to become popular

Had this happen decades ago on the Outer Banks.

Was casting into the surf with one rod while I had a cut bait with a sinker off a rod that was standing up in a 5 gallon bucket. Seagull comes flying low up the beach with its legs hanging down. It hit the line between the standing rod and the water and flipped round and round, tail over tincups and was hanging there upside down flapping like a mother. It undid itself before I could get over to offer assistance.

not really fished, drag bars with balled hooks

I’ve caught a couple nice size freshwater clams using flies.

Here in Tn they were special boats and the "brailed" for mussels.That cloed out in the 70's they dive now.

Not exactly PADI or OHSA approved equipment!

‘Caught’ a bat with a 6” Rapala while fishing at night for browns on the Upper Delaware River.
Was there when a salmon angler fishing on the high wall behind the Post Office foul hooked a beaver in the Oswego River. The beaver made quite a run downstream.