Thank you for this post! I was thinking about starting a similar the whole way home yesterday…I couldn’t be the only one with dumb luck!

Decided to stop at a river on the way back from Northern WI yesterday to try for River or Greater Redhorse…after a bit, success! I had the biggest redhorse I have ever hooked on! What a monster! Since I was standing on a big rock while fishing and forgot the net, landing was going to be tough. At this point I would of even taken some of Tyler W’s netting skills. :) I managed to get the fish into some slack water, about 1-2” deep. That thing was huge and there was no question it was either a river or greater (BIG mouth)! Went down to grab it and as soon as I touched it, that big ass tail began whacking the water and it shot through my legs back into deeper water. I tried to follow with the rod, but with the rod being 7ft and me a little bit shorter than that, no luck. Snap went the line, and the rod just about made the same noise over my knee, but I thought better and smack the water instead. So close!

Second hooked/lost species was a Chinook salmon…I never got 100% ID, but the way it smacked a dipsey rod and then took off on a 300ft run with out ever slowing pretty much says it’s a king. I battled it for over 10 minutes and got a glimpse of it about 40ft back from the boat before the hooked popped out. Ugh!

Third (yep, luck was not with me last week) was a Coho salmon. Did everything but reel the last 30 feet of line in. My boat, my rods, my tackle. I picked the spoon, set the line and after a bit, the dipsey popped and I grabbed the rod. Couple pumps to make sure the fish was hooked, looked at the line counter and 30 ft of line was left to reel in…passed it to the father-in-law who initially refused, but I insisted. Within not more than one revolution of the reel, the fish was at the surface and I could see it was a Coho! It was only about 18” long, so before I could get “give me that rod back!!” out of my mouth, it was at the back of the boat. Although a bit cranky, I still grabbed the net and landed it. The F-I-L also got the first fish of the morning, which was the only other coho we boated.

I’m normally okay with losing fish, but it would have been nice to land these three so I could get closer to my goal.