so i was wondering since you guys here all take fishing very serious and we all know just about every serious fisherman has at least one good story of a hook going through their hand or a bad bite. lets here your stories.


part of this story literally happened to me today and is what got me thinking. so as many of you know i spent a week up at LOTW doing some esox fishing. while fishing there was one mid sized pike i caught and when i was unhooking it the jaw spreaders slipped from its mouth and were thrown into the water and the fish clamped down on my thumb leaving a deep puncture that gushed blood for a good 10 minutes. it healed after a few days and it looked like a big wart with lots of dead skin hanging off. it would regularly fill up like a blister and i would have to poke it with a pin and drain it. well a few weeks passed and its still there but it doesnt hurt. i put a slight pressure on it today and it felt like it was full of fluid so i went to drain it and nothing came out but i did feel something hard on the end of the pin. it wasn't that far in so i had no idea what it was. i did a little picking at it and pulled out a tooth. ive got it in a small bag and will be keeping it.



sorry for crappy phone quality.





the tooth

crazy.

I'm impressed.

Gruesome, I have a long, jagged scar down my right thumb from a wound left from a pretty typical fartknocker sized pike about six years ago. It wasn't from the teeth but the gill rakers, which are just as sharp as sure everyone is aware. I'm in esox central so my fingers are dinged and scratched all summer long, including today -- although I must say, I've never pulled a tooth from my thumb. Again, gross.

I have just a tiny scar, but from an injury that was a lot worse. Three years ago I had a 40" pike fully puncture the inside of my thumb with a tooth. It bled, a lot... I bandaged my thumb up and kept fishing, but within a few hours I could not bend my thumb at all, and had to quit as I could not grip my reel. It got quite badly infected and so on. I can't remember for how many months it would *click* and *pop* every time I would bend it, and it would only bend about half-way. It was over a year before I got most of the mobility and strength back. Even now, three years later, it still takes more effort to bend than my other thumb, and occasionally I lose strength for a short period of time (randomly losing grip while holding objects).

wow justin. that just goes to show you how bad pike can mess you up. the one that i got the bit from was just barely 30 and it put quite a hole in my hand but damn that must have been awfull getting bit by a big one. lucky for me ive never had a fish over 35 get me although i have come close a few times while unhooking some big musky. my 53" barely knicked me and put a good scrape in my hand a few years back i cant imagine how big of a mess that would have been if it had gotten my hand in its mouth. ive noticed though its usually the little guys that do the most damage but like in your case if a big one gets you just right it can be pretty bad.

I guess Northern Pike are notorious for causing problems. I went to the emergency room once to get a treble hook from a rapala removed from my finger. The fish that caused it was a fartnocker as MikeB puts it; about a 18" pike.

I have numerous gar scars, as we call them, but they won't show up in a photo very well. The best one is on my wrist which is still quite visible from an angry gar in 2003. It looks like a large cat raked it's claws across my wrist. I wrapped my wrist up in an old t-shirt and kept fishing because we were into a lot of gar.

i only have one scar that is still visible from fishing... I wrapped the line around my hand to pull in a fish... but the fish was a shark and when it took off the line cranked down around my thumb and made a perfect slice around my thumb where the line was wrapped... it was pretty scary because that was 50 lb braid and it wouldnt break and it was just digging into my skin. I managed to get some slack and unravel it though.

ive had this happen a few times with toothy fish like gar and bowfin though

I'm too tech savvy that I won't be able to post a picture of my scar, but yeah I got an everlasting one on my right wrist down from my thumb from a Gar caught on the St.Croix. Somehow the Gar was able to pierce me with it's tail fin leaving the fin bone in there...had to cut out the bone stuck in my right wrist, and now I have a permanent scar from it.

Fish_E_Hunter

No pics, but the first time I saw a Pike caught my friend bet me I wouldn't lip it.... my own fault, I knew it was coming.
I've gotten hooks through the hand, elbow, arm, legs, and actually hooked myself through the ear on a cast when I was 7 or 8. It was funny because I went to cast, watched, waited, and nothing. I turned around and felt something swinging from my ear..
That has to be my best one

ive lipped a pike before. i caught an extremely tiny one only about 5 inches long on a little nymph and figured itd be tiny enough to lip. i was wrong

An 8 inch pike nicked me just this past weekend, and I bled for over half an hour. It never fails to amaze me how sharp their teeth are. Even with seemingly "perfect" handling, it's not unusual to end up with a bloody hand from contact with teeth or gillrakers that you didn't even feel.