I want to hear some of the strangest encounters or stories that you have experienced or that has been passed down throughout your family.

I have one from my Grandfather.

When my grandfather was in college he was back home, wade fishing, at Port Isabel beside a family friend's private pier. He had a stringer of trout on his waist and out of no where something hit his stringer, took/let every trout off the stringer, and swam away leaving a huge cloud of mud. My grandfather and his buddies decided to hook a whole trout to one of the big hooks that use to be used to catch grouper, and connect the hook to a rope that was connected to a tire, and put the tire around one of the columns of the small private pier...the buddies left and came back a little later. When they went out back to the private pier...the tire was gone, along with the end of the pier. My grandfather thinks it was a big shark, my dad thinks it was a huge gar...I just love hearing that story over and over again.

Let me hear yours!

About 8 yrs ago I was walleye fishing with a guy in North Carloina. We were down in a creek bottom covered in trees and the sun had just set. We couldnt see a foot in front of us but we still knew how far out we could throw our jigs without getting hung up. The guy I was with suddenly had a strange feeling with fishing pole, said it started vibrating. I thought he was crazy so i kept fishing. A few seconds later he had reeled his jig in and said something strange was going on with it. Again I thought he was crazy so I grabbed a flashlight. When I shined it at his jig we both came unglued because he had caught a bat when he threw his jig out. Ive never seen anything like it, prolly never will again like that.

Haha man that is a crazy story! I was trolling a white swirl tail grub at coleto creek one time and a bird flew into my line and eventually my jig stuck into the crow or whatever it was...that was not a pleasant experience. Did yall cut the line?

No we didnt cut the line, that hillbilly took the bat off the jig.

Not a saltwater fishing story, but caught a 3 lb largemouth bass last spring that had a snake head and approx. three inches of snake hanging out its mouth. Snake was dead so we just unhooked the fish and turned it loose after getting a photo.

Back when it was legal to do so, I remember my whole family would go seining. My dad was 6'4" so he would always get the deep end of the net. One day we were out at crystal beach and my dad had only pulled the net around twenty yards when he started yelling and swimming to shore. Just leaving the net. He said something big had come around the end of the net. He said it hit his leg hard, but what really got him going was that it just kept going and going. He estimated what ever it was to be around twenty feet long.

That would end my seining career too...

have caught seagulls while fishing on the ocean, had to reel them in from the sky to get the hook out. I always thought that was fly fishing until I saw A River Runs Through It.

one day while surf fishing on PINS a juvenile green sea turtle was swimming around. we just kept doing our own thing, me fishing and her swimming around until after about a half hour I had to go back to the car. when I came wading back out I didnt see where she was, until I almost kicked her and she shot off like a rocket...i think we both piddled a little, startling the sh.. out of each other

no fish worth mentioning that day, but was one of the more interesting trips

Any idea as to what it was? That is interesting.

I have always heard that if you pluck a few feathers out and toss them in the water around your boat, all the other seagulls will stay away. I have done it ever since I heard about it though.

Circa 1978, My family hauled our runabout from Austin down to Port O’connor. We met my uncle who lived in Edna. We ran into Matagorda Bay anchored up and hoped for the best. They didn’t really know what they were doing. I was just a little kid at the time. The day was calm and both boats packed full of extended family cruised and anchored in the pocket at the Big Jetty. Every bait imaginable was sent to the bottom but I remember squid primarily. We were mildly successful at catching what most would consider trash fish, ie pup sharks, drum, croaker, sand trout, gaftop etc.

My uncle brought a 4/0 rigged with really heavy mono that he had taken offshore a few times. He sent a big bait down. Sometime later the rod sounds off and the fight is on. Well not so much a fight as a tug of war. No blistering runs just steady pulls that ended in the deep water of the ship channel. The fight lasted a long while. The rod was passed to every man in the boat. Eventually, they started cranking down the drag to pressure the fish. The extra pressure succeeded in pulling the boat’s anchor free. The line tension then pulled the boat in the channel. They fired up and motor back to us and tossed us a line. We held them in place until our anchor pulled. We continued on like this for hours. We would motor on to the sand and toss out the anchor and slowly be pulled back to the channel.

Eventually, they fought the fish close enough to the boat to see a grayish shadow in the relatively clean water. To my (7 yr old) eyes the grayish shadow appeared ¾ the size of our boat. The fact was not lost on my mother who was already nervous about boats, the bay, and her kids being near either, and of course everyone had seen the movie Jaws. The shadow pulled drag and moved back to the deeper water.

My uncle (mom’s brother) asked for a turn at the rod next. The first thing he did was give a quick spin to the star drag which of course broke the fish off. Intentional or not that’s how it ended. Later examination of the mono line revealed portions where the line had been stretched to ½ its original diameter. This has been a legendary fish story in my family ever since.

Now 34 years later, I fish that same jetty and nearshore every chance I get. I have caught some big fish there but nothing I couldn’t bust on 4/0. I guess I should try a big wad squid again. The fish most likely was a big ray.

Not a saltwater story but funny.

When I started flinging flies 20 years ago, me and my BIL would fish below Denison dam most every weekend. wading the river that much we knew ever rock and every piece of junk in that channel. At one point, someone had lost an anchor and about 50 feet of heavy anchor line that hung in the middle of the river. About 2 weeks after we saw this, the corps opened up the gates letting out a lot of water.
We were on the OK side taking a break and watching the other anglers when one guys starts screaming that he has a biggun. He would run up and down that rip-rap fighting the rope on his surf rod, get it closer to the bank only to have the current pull the line right back out. He fought that rope for a good 30 minutes before he finally broke off. We had a great laugh watching him hoot and holler and stumble up and down the shore. He was so heartbroken when it came unbuttoned, we didnt have the heart to tell him the truth. Besides, with any luck he might of hooked it a second time.

I reside in South Africa and the incident that took place was quite amusing.

The St. Lucia Wetland Park area in SA is a national reserve but also declared world heritage site. The St. Lucia has a lagoon apart from the huge lake system and every year in July to September, adult kob migrate into the lake system to spawn and then leave again for the open ocean. Some of these kob reach sizes up to 75kg but the average adult size would be in the region of 15-20kg.

On a very hot summer day, I was on the lagoon with my boat at anchor and surrounded by about 50 other boats. You have to anchor because the boats will drift into each other and cause accidents, damage or tempers flaring up. I had a nice piece of blue fish on with an inline sinker, not too big so that the bait according to me, should float just about 12 inches of the bottom in the strong current. The ratchets on my reels were on and I was patiently waiting for a pick-up. It was sweltering hot, the lagoon was quiet and the fish was off the bite and I started to dose of in the shade of the canopy of the boat.

All of a sudden one of my reels started to scream like a cat in labour, I jumped up and grab the rod. I was looking for the line in the water but could not find it. Then I noticed the line going up in the air at about 60° with my bait securely hanging from the claws of a fish eagle. All the other boats heard the reel and everybody was laughing at me whilst I was fighting the eagle. I panicked because I was already visualising me fighting this eagle in the boat while trying to remove the hooks. All of a sudden the hooks tore from the fillet, missed the eagle's claws and the eagle flew off with my bait. I was relieved.

What happened was that the current was stronger than normal due to spring tide and the weight to small. The current lifted my bait to just below the surface where the eagle spotted it at picked it up. I will never forget that day when I almost caught an eagle on rod and reel.

No my dad didnt see it. Im sure it was a big shark. His 20 ft was probably an exageration. Those nets were 100 feet long so anything that didnt get stuck went around the end. I remember them filling up ice chest full of reds and specks. Im sure that why its now illegal.

man, I'd like to see a video of that!