The One That Got Away

Last Saturday, my husband and I went fishing. We left the kids with his folks and hit the lake for about four hours with another friend, each of us enjoying each other's company and quiet time away from our children for a few hours.

We were fishing for bass, so we were fishing pretty close to abandoned docks and patches of weeds. Many of the ones we were catching were only 11 or 12 inches long, and they had to be 14 inches to keep. Drag!

My husband got bored and decided to switch bait and thought it would be fun to try out a new spoon. (For those of you non-fisher folk, it's just a shiny metal lure that's painted on one side and is supposed to mimic an injured fish.) The spoon was three or so inches long, and I teased him that there was nothing big enough in the small in-land lake we were fishing in to catch with that bait.

Boy! Was I wrong!

After his second cast, Aaron said he thought he was stuck. He pulled up on his pole but there was no give. I told him to let the line run, and it started pulling. Oh, there was something on that line. And it was BIG!

Aaron let her run for about ten minutes before he started pulling her in. (If you don't run 'em, they can snap the line.) He was still sitting in our boat, but I stood up to see what he had caught. My eyes literally bugged out. I yelled a few expletives, and she went back underwater. It was a HUGE northern pike!

Once the guys knew what was going on, they were able to catch a glimpse of her too. Yup, she was big.

At one point, she surfaced for a few minutes, her eyes just above the surface of the water, as if she was studying us. What was going to happen now?

At this point, I need to explain the ridiculousness of our situation. The lake we were on does not allow motors, so our boat only had a small electric trolling motor that doesn't cast a wake. Our friend was in a boat beside us, and we were joined up in order to figure out what to do. My husband's boat is a sailboat that he bought without a mast or sail for $50 that he then put two boards and seats in so that he could take it fishing. Our friend has a small row boat with three seats, one of which opens up for storage. Our net was small in comparison to the fish. We were lucky if were going to get her head in it. And just to add to the hilarity of the situation, none of us are "experienced" fishermen. We went pan fishing with our dads as kids and that was about it.

"What do we do?" we asked each other. Aaron wanted to keep it, and we agreed to try to measure her in the water. I locked the measure at 33 inches and held it above her as she was surfaced. Holy mackerel! She was even longer! A good two or three inches longer! The men decided we needed to keep her.

But where were we going to put her? And how were we going to get the lure off that giant fish? And how did we get her out of the water when she was so large and had such big teeth? We were all too scared and inexperienced to really know how to handle the situation.

I suggested hammering her in the head and killing her in the water, but a) we agreed that was inhumane and b) no one had a hammer. (I know hammering a fish in the head sounds terrible, but isn't a slow death of suffocation just as bad?) It was agreed that she couldn't come in my and my husband's boat--she was too big to even put on the floor. And she'd tip us if she thrashed around, which we knew she was going to do if she were left alive. The men decided that she would go in the storage seat of our friend's boat. Our friend would net her tail and the two would lift her by line and net into the seat, cut the line, close the seat, and wait for her to die.

Not a great plan. But it was a plan.

The guys waited until she surfaced again and counted to three. I pulled my hat over my eyes and held my breath. (I didn't like this one bit! I wish we'd never caught that stupid fish because now we had to kill her and I just felt sick!) I heard the guys yelling, thrashing of water, an expletive, and then silence. I peeked out from under my cap, and the guys were just staring into the water with mouths and eyes wide. Aaron was holding a broken line between his fingers.

I sighed in relief and both men cursed and laughed a little. That was quite a fish that got away!

Aaron has been sulking for the past three days about "The One that got Away." He bought a bigger net and some new spoons. He's planning to go back for her.

I don't tell my husband, but I really am glad she got away. I worried about her the first night, picturing her swimming the lake with this huge lure stuck in her mouth, but Aaron assured me it would work its way out. Her eyes have been haunting my dreams, and it would have hurt me to see such a magnificent creature killed, even if we were going to eat her.