Working at a tackle shop you hear all kinds of crazy fishing stories and no fish is bigger than the fish you almost caught, right? I always hear how this person lost a 10-pound largemouth or that person lost a 60-pound striper. Isn’t it funny how 90% of these stories of giant fish end with the fish getting away? Why is that? Are these fish old and wise? Are the storytellers bending the truth? I’ll leave the debate up to you.
Let’s take it back to July 14, 2016; it was warm and so muggy you could cut the air with a knife. That’s assuming you could even bear to swing a knife through all the mosquitoes! But bug bites were the last thing on my mind, because I was on a monster mission and I wasn’t stopping for anything! I remember looking back into my logbook and seeing that I had that day circled. And when darkness fell I met up with a buddy and we went over the game plan. We were going to fish wakebaits and other topwaters over a series of flats we’d been fishing. I distinctly remember telling him, with mosquitoes swarming in the haze of my headlamp, “she’s gonna eat tonight, I can feel it!” We’d been working this bite for a while and tonight seemed like the night to catch a giant with her guard down.
I tied on a Berkley Wakebull and sent it hissing into the darkness. I remembered it being so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but we couldn’t risk spooking the fish with our lights. Wading through the shallows there were hundreds of quarter-sized bluegills in the weeds, running into my feet! I smiled because I knew that meant the bass had them pinned in tight. I made a second cast, throwing the little wakebait as far as I could. It wasn’t more than three or four cranks before I heard a huge blowup and went tight. “I’m on!” I yelled over, “Big fish!”
In that moment, I swear everything around me seem to slow down, kind of like The Matrix when you could see everything in slow motion in the air. My thoughts became loud voices, an inner monologue shouting through the darkness. I knew this was the fish I was after! Then, it jumped out of the water and began bullying its way down the bank, before turning to head toward deeper water and the branches of a downed tree.
I swore I wouldn’t let her get in there, but she had other plans. Everything about this fish felt different; she was stronger and seemed smarter, like she knew she’d messed up and seemed to know exactly where to go to get out of trouble. And she was letting me know that I was going to pay for her mistake!
And she made good on that promise, diving into that tree and wrapping into the branches. I was standing there panting, eyes wide open and sweating. I called over to my buddy and told him to run over to me, I was going in to get that fish!
“You’re crazy!” he said. But, I was already throwing my keys, phone and wallet on the shoreline, and walking into the dark and murky water and before long I was swimming. The top of the tree was maybe 40 yards off the shoreline, reeling as I kicked, I finally reached it. Standing on one of the bigger branches, I flicked on my light and found several half-digested bluegills floating there. I thought, “I found her house and it’s a mess!”
Wedging the St. Croix Mojo between a few stout branches, I took the line in my fingers and followed it down. When my face was about to touch the water, I pushed my foot down the line and felt her body shake when it grazed her. “My God, this fish is huge,” I said out loud. I knew I had to go ‘full send’. Face-first into the water, head completely submerged, I was diving for my prize! When my hands finally found her, I grabbed the fish like a football and bear-hugged her to my body! Standing in the slick branches, I clenched the rod in my teeth, latched onto her bottom lip and swam slowly back to shore.
I weighed the fish at 8 pounds, a true Rhode Island 8! My buddy just stared at me, laughing, and said, “I have never seen anything like what just happened! You’re insane! But, congratulations!” I stood there dripping and said, “I wasn’t going to take ‘no’ for answer!”
If I hadn’t gone into that tree and dove for that fish, there was no way I was ever going to land her. Staying on that shore and trying angle her out of that mess was only going to result in a broken line, and I didn’t want it end as “just another fish story.” Sometimes this is what it takes to win that epic battle over the one that DIDN’T get away!
