Fishing is a finicky thing.  I spent a week in a Bass Tracker with state of the art fishing tracking gizmos and managed to catch two bluegill, one bull head and an 11 inch bass.  The only keepers were the blue gill .  

Two weeks later I spend 20 minutes on the shore of a different lake and I was pulling out Bluegill as quickly as I could bait the hook and cast.  While several were caught I only consider the 4 over six inches as keepers.  Had I kept the smaller fries, I would’ve had nine or ten.  Yep I was averaging a fish every two minutes! I would still be there but for the fact that the car was packed and it was time to go, and divorce is expensive!  It was as if the bluegill  knew I had to leave. Bluegill are like that.  they mock you!

Worse still, I couldn’t even keep the keepers.  As I said we were already packed to leave.  I gave the fish to the fisherman who was five feet away from me.  He had been fishing all morning and managed to only land three fish.  Like I said, fishing is a finicky thing.  Thinking back I should've kept them all.  It would've served them right for mocking me!

But that’s not what I’m here to write about.  I’m here to write about the one that got away!    It was a day earlier; the day before the Bluegill mocked me.

Now to be fair, I didn’t hook the one that got away.  My wife hooked it.  She was casting with a little spinner bait from the peer.   Suddenly something starts running with her line.  She is trying to reel it in but it was putting up too much of a fight and the tension on here reel is too lose.  It is pulling out line faster than she can reel it in.  

Next thing she knows the fish is swimming around a nearby peer.  It looks like it is going to get tangled in the pilings.   She is reeling but it is going nowhere so I grab the line beyond the tip of her pole and start pulling in line while she reels  it back in.  I slowly start pulling in line.  There must be about a undred feet of line out.  The fish starts swimming away from the peer toward open water.  My brother in law comes over and checks the tension on my wife’s reel.  It is nothing fancy; a Zebco 440 Spincast.  He tightens up the tension and I release the line but the fish starts pulling out more line. So I go back to pulling in the line by hand. 

It is a slow process.  I pull in a foot or two and my wife reels in the loose line.  We’re doing this for some time.  Slowly the fish gives up the fight and starts coming in closer to the peer with each tug of the line.  I can still feel resistance but there is no real fight.  I tell my wife it is probably just a turtle.  Slowly I pull it in.  25 feet… 20 feet … 15 feet…10 feet.  I ask my brother in law to get the bucket ready in case we got something good.  Five feet … four feet … three feet.  Finally I can start to see the outline of something in the water.   I shout “Holy Cripes!   You’ve caught a Monster! We need a NET!”  But we don’t have a net!  My wife asks “What is it!”

And as soon as she asks  The biggest  Channel Cat  I’ve ever seen breaks  the surface of the water  rolls over and slaps the water ;  snapping the line in the process!    So often it is the ones that get away that make the best stories!  That must be why fisherman love to talk about them.