Weird Events

Although it’s not common, some mighty strange things can happen while fly fishing. It stands to reason that the more hours you spend fishing, the bigger your collection of odd stories will be. Although I don’t get to fish nearly as much as I used to, there was a time when I spent an average of probably 200+ days a year fishing at least a little. That quantity of stream time provided plenty of opportunity to amass some stories that sound like whoppers but, hand-to-God, everything related below is factual and without exaggeration. I can’t really rate these first two stories on which is higher on the weird scale. They both seem equally surreal. You decide.

Once, while fishing dry flies on Ridley Creek, I lassoed a trout. This was certainly not intentional on my part, and I’m sure it wasn’t intentional on the trout’s part. Even so, the fish essentially did it to himself. I must have had a lot of slack in my tippet when he offered at my floating fly. I reacted instinctively to the splashy rise, and live weight on the line indicated an apparent hook-up. As I played the fish I saw that he was coming in tail-first. “Oh no,” I thought, “He’s foul-hooked.” But in fact the trout was not hooked at all. Somehow the fly and tippet were pulled underwater in such a way that the fly looped around and the standing part of the leader got inside the hook bend, effectively forming a slip knot that then tightened around the wrist of the trout’s tail. Once I managed to bring him to hand, I simply opened the noose and off he went little the worse for wear.

The other story that’s tied for weirdest also occurred on Ridley Creek, in the same pool now that I think of it. (I’m not sure if some powerful cosmic force is focused there or if I just spend an inordinate amount of time fishing in that location.) I was nymph fishing and on one drift I snagged the bottom. After several fruitless attempts to free the hook from the streambed, I decided to break off rather than wade out and disturb the water I was fishing. I tied on a new fly, and several casts later I again hung up again. This time I was able to free my fly, but as it was coming in I could tell that something extra was at the end of the leader. Imagine my surprise and amazement to discover that I’d hooked the fly I’d just lost, bend to bend, thus recovering it. 

We’ve all had bats darting around us as we fished a good hatch at dusk. But I actually caught one. I was fishing a Sulphur hatch one evening, now that I think of it, at the same place on Ridley as the last two events. (You know, this is starting to get really scary.) 

On one backcast I at first thought I’d snagged a tree branch, but when I turned to see where the trouble was I could see a bat flying at the end of my leader like an animated kite. In a moment the bat fluttered down to the ground. I managed to hand-over-hand the leader until he was close enough for me to very gently pin his wing to the ground with my boot. He was hooked in the tail membranes, so I reached down with my clamps and easily backed out the barbless hook. I lifted my foot off his wing and he hopped away into the shrubbery and I was back in business with the trout.

I didn’t make too much of that at the time, assuming that the bat had simply flown into my backcast and gotten foul-hooked. I should have known that such a skilled predator would not be so clumsy. It couldn’t have been more than a week later that I was watching a PBS documentary about wildlife photography and one of the segments was about the mechanics of how bats feed. Everyone knows about bats finding their prey by echolocation. But no one had found out how they actually caught the prey. Did they grab it directly with their mouth; gather it in with their wings, or what? Ultra high-speed photography revealed that bats scoop up their prey in flight with their tail membranes! So I did not foul-hook that bat, he intended to eat my fly. I caught him. I must say, however, that I’m really glad he didn’t have time to put the fly into his mouth before the line came tight. 

My final weird fishing tale, you’ll be glad to know, did not occur on the Bridge Pool of Ridley Creek. It happened at the second bridge on Cedar Run in North Central Pennsylvania. My buddy Don Kaiser and I had gone up to fish the Sulphur spinner fall on Cedar that evening. As so often happens, the closer we got to darkness the faster and more furious the fishing became.

Finally I could no longer see my fly on the water, although I could still hear slurping rises out in front of me. I already had my cast measured out, and used a favorite tactic for such situations. Lay the fly on the water and count: one-two-three and lift. It’s amazing how often you can hook another few trout this way. Sure enough, on one cast I lifted and there was live weight at the end of my line. But it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t heavy enough to be a typical trout, and it wasn’t acting like a fish at all. I retrieved my line until I could lift my fly from the water and see what I had. Dangling on the end of my leader was a frog, hanging upside-down by his left hind foot and making pitiful swimming motions with his front legs. I released this unusual catch and called it a night.

I’m sure that most of our DVWFFA members have strange fish tales of their own. If you’d like to share yours, send them to me at marykuss@cs.com and if I get enough responses I’ll collect them into another article like this one. Please, reassure me that stuff like this happens to other people?

--Mary S. Kuss-- 
Winter 2009 Issue