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Posts: 8849
| Lost a MONSTER fish yesterday...
7:04 am:
Working a spot known to hold big fish and ONLY big fish, new moon day, sunrise and moonrise 25 minutes apart, 4 minutes after full moon....
Clouds thickening up, little wind, you can feel the pressure dropping ahead of a warm front due in later in the day...
27 feet of water, throwing a magnum dawg, this is the spot, this is the day, first week of July, first moon phase, perfect, I mean PERFECT weather. These are the times when everything is aligned and you just KNOW it's a big fish day...
Holy cow, look at the graph, look at the baitfish stacked up in here! WOW they're thick...
First cast, *splash* count down 10 seconds, keep the line tight, *click* ONE PULL, reel, reel, *bump* *WHAM!* Set the hook and it's ON! Holy %^&$ she's BIG!!! I can't turn the crank on the reel, I can't MOVE this fish! BIG fish, BIIIIIG!! and with that, two head shakes and then... nothing....
#$%@! $%%^# !!! #$%@ , #$%@, #$%@ , #$%@ , #$%@ !!!!..... #### !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bring the lure up, (which WAS fresh out of the box as of yesterday) The leader (also new) is bent up like a pretzel.., 175 pound steel leader, the end 4" is bent in three places. There's a 1/2 cut in the nose that goes all the way down to the weight. Scuffs on both eyes, parallel gashes down the belly, fang marks down the side, DEEP cuts down the other side, all the way down the bait, into the tail, chunk missing out of the belly, this thing is SHREDDED... I measured 9" from the first bend in the leader to the fang marks on the tail. This fish had the whole bait piled in her mouth!! Magnum bulldawgs aren't small, either
We compared it to the damage inflicted to other bulldawgs on low-mid 40's fish, and these teeth markes DRAWFED anything we'd seen before.
This was a HUGE fish. This was a fish people see and never catch. This was a fish that guys work for their whole lives and only a few are lucky enough to catch. And I HAD this fish. I got this fish to bite, right where we thought she should be, right when we thought we should be there, and I was READY. I was as ready as one can be because I felt it, I knew today was the day and that was the spot, I threw that cast and I just FELT IT...
So obviously this fish wasn't meant to be, I didn't even get a look at it, but I felt it. Comparing it to the 40.5" fish I got a few weeks ago is like comparing a canoe to a ranger. I could not MOVE this fish. I saw what it did to my leader and my bulldawg. Amazing... Truly amazing. At least 9" across the mouth.
This fish will haunt me. WHAT went wrong? There must be 15 holes and cuts in that bulldawg, DEEP cuts. She even had part of the leader in her mouth, all that was sticking out was about 3" of the tail... I set the hook, I never gave her any slack line... This was caught in a place where "big" is 47". people have SEEN fish over 50", but they're few and far between. This fish had to be at least 50", maybe bigger than that.
We trolled, we casted, we went back to that spot three times, dawgs, crankbaits, jigs, but she was gone. The baitfish were gone. Everything that could possibly align aligned yesterday morning, and I was there on top of a giant fish, and that fish was hungry.
WHAT COULD I POSSIBLY HAVE DONE DIFFERENT?
Did I just not hit her hard enough? How do you not get hooks in a fish when she's got the whole bait in her mouth? What can I learn from this experience?
Do you guys have a fish that haunts you?
Jeff
Edited by esoxaddict 7/7/2005 1:46 PM
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Posts: 743
| Jeff..sounds like you went musky fishing...this exact senerio has happened to hundreds and hundreds of musky anglers accorss North American...it's the big ones that get away that keep you going back..not the 40 inchers you catch..but the the "wish i would landed that one" story keeps you going back. pretty typical scenerio..i can tell you this..keep going after them, and it will happen again!
thanks for sharing the story..now i'm jonsin' to leave work early!
tomcat |
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Posts: 1764
Location: Ogden, Ut | Hey Jeff,
At least the hooks didn't pull out! I think tomcat nailed it. Your gameplan only overlooked one detail - there's no such thing as a sure thing! Solid plan, nice execution, but sometimes they get away. Gotta love the fact that you had the opportunity!
K. |
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Posts: 667
Location: Roscoe IL | Stupid Fish!!
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Posts: 4266
| $hit happens!
We are all kin of Captain Ahab and will never rest until we meet the beast eye to eye.
It's that intangible 'luck' factor that some guys don't believe in.
It's the reason that you stick all 3 trebles of a 10" glider into the mouth of a 20" pike, just to have a four footer hit the same lure and never get stuck.
Persevere brutha!!!!
The beast still swims, doesn't she?
Beav |
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Posts: 462
Location: Antioch, IL | Nicely put Beav.
Definately don't beat yourself up over it. Thats why it's called fishin' not catchin'. I've lost lots of fish for lots of reasons, but the one that still bugs the hell out of me was back before I had ever even seen a picture of a muskie. I was fishing the stumps in Lusk Creek, near where I grew up in Southern IL, and hooked into the bass of all bass. Big ol' Bucketmouth! I managed to work it out of and around what seemed like a hundred stumps (probably 2 or 3) with an old spinning reel w/ 4# mono. Played it right up to the boat and the realization hit me that I had no net and this fish was huge...pushing that 10-12 # size I had only seen in magazines. The fish had waived the white flag and was hanging verticaly with as much of his face out of the water that I dared to lift. I leaned the rod against the side of the boat and wedged the butt end under my foot so I could use both hands on this fish in the hopes of lowering the odds of burying the hook in my thumb. I reached down to lip her and just as I did the line snapped not only releasing my prize but also the tension I had put on the rod. It sent the rod tip smack into the right side of my face and created a lovely seesaw effect that sent the butt end into my nuts! PERFECT! The image of that fish with my thumb millimeters from having hold still bothers me 14 years later. |
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Location: Athens, Ohio | That's what I like about muskie fishing: close encounters still count. Congrats on finding and fooling your fish-of-a-lifetime. You know where the beeyouch lives now, stop by and visit her often. m |
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Posts: 135
Location: Elgin, IL | Great story esoxaddict. I've got one just like it... except I was using a spring dawg in the reeds on Cass Lake, not counting down a mag-dawg. I think that was the first time I realized that if a really big girl wants to go somewhere, it doesn't matter how heavy your gear is. I second-guessed the hell out of myself after that for a while too. Sliced up my favorite (and first) spring dawg beyond repair as well. I tried everything to piece it back together and keep the weight from popping out... but it never swam well again.
And that experience sure keeps me coming back to the same spot year after year too. Throwing the same lure in the same spot... hoping to make it all happen again.
And another great story, Fish and Whistle. Although yours makes me laugh a little more than the first. That would have been priceless if it was caught on tape! |
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Posts: 1769
Location: Algonquin, ILL | I have been chasing these beasts for over 30 years so from the description you gave it just sounds like a good day on the water.
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Posts: 32944
Location: Rhinelander, Wisconsin | Some get stuck, some don't. Big girls have a very large and toothy yap, lots of opportunity for a bait to get past something that isn't a tooth! Any encounter with a piggy that ends with the fish winning is good for the memory... |
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Posts: 8849
| Now that I've had a day to recover there are three things that stick in my mind:
1. That fish didn't MOVE. It was like setting the hook on a truck. WOW! Next time I'm hitting her as hard as I can.
2. Hey fish -- I know where you live, and I know what you like to eat!
3. #*^@, that was fun! I can't wait to do it again!  |
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| I feel ya buddy. I had a plano tackle box bite my weagle the other morning and she didn't hooks. Just smiled and said I will get you some time this summer. Seriously she was the size of a plano tackle box.
I know what you mean. We get up every morning at 4:00 fish all morning then go to work then go fishing and then sleep for a couple of hours and do it all over again to have an oppertunity to catch the monster of a life time and loose it. That sucks.
Buttttt......Good thing you lost her knowing you probably wouldn't ever have caught one bigger you would hit that snooze button a couple more times. Now you don't have to hit the snooze because you woke up setting the hook in your dreams. Good luck and I hope you catch her!!!!!!!!!
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Posts: 185
Location: Mendota Heights, MN | It was probably just a weed. 
Steve |
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Posts: 4266
| Read the following attachment.
Edited by Beaver 7/8/2005 9:27 PM
Attachments
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 Who We Are- The Captain Ahab Factor.doc (26KB - 544 downloads)
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