What's your Most Memorable Fish?

[Southerly]

my most memorable fish has to be my first fish!

i was probably 4 yrs old fishing from shore with my family on a little creek using worms.

i think i understood the overall concept but had not realized the fish would actually pull at the rod. so i let it have it.

i remember seeing the rod slip away underwater and either i said something or my Dad saw what was happening. he rolled up his pants legs and waded in. he got the rod and gave it back to me to reel in.

my most memorable fish - a nice little pumpkinseed.

[Yak Fish]

my most memorable fish has to be my first fish!

i was probably 4 yrs old fishing from shore with my family on a little creek using worms.

i think i understood the overall concept but had not realized the fish would actually pull at the rod. so i let it have it.

i remember seeing the rod slip away underwater and either i said something or my Dad saw what was happening. he rolled up his pants legs and waded in. he got the rod and gave it back to me to reel in.

my most memorable fish - a nice little pumpkinseed.

Hahaha, that's awesome

[ictalurus]

Great thread idea and excellent stories. The picture of the tarpon beginning to jump is pretty incredible.

There's memorable fish, and then there are memorable days. For memorable fish, I've got three.

The first was the first fish Dad and I ever caught together. When I was 7, Ma had suggested that Dad should take me fishing since it was a good, traditional father-son activity. Little did she now what a consuming hobby it would become. Anyway, we fish at Bull Run Marina for most of that summer from shore. We hooked up with bass several times but could never manage to land them. It was pretty frustrating. We were fishing one day, and Dad managed to hook crappie and bring it to shore. He was holding the line up to show it to me, and the fish was thrashing around on the line. I thought the fish needed to be subdued, so I said, "Wait, I'll club it." I grabbed a small log and swung as hard as I could before Dad figured out what was going on. Needless to say, I missed the fish but managed to completely wrap the fish, the log, and Dad's rod with a big bunch of the fishing line. On the upside, I learned that I really liked eating fresh fish that evening.

About four years later, we had further honed our skills and gotten better at finding fish (and not clubbing them). We also had been renting jon boats, which made all the difference. I wish we had known about kayaks back then. Anyway, we had a set of rocks we liked to fish, and I had something big hit my 4" bass worm, run, then break my line off. Dad cast his worm in the same area, had a hit, but the fish broke the line again. This went on for half an hour before Dad managed to land the fish. It was a 15 or 20lb blue cat, and its mouth showed the signs of being hooked repeatedly. Later, in the summer, the water dropped a few feet, and we saw that there was a tire where we caught the cat. It likely was a male that was defending its nest, which was in the tire, from our marauding worms. That was pretty cool.

The last one happened on my honeymoon and was the most perfect zen moment of my fishing career. I was fly fishing the Watauga in Boone, NC while my wife snoozed in the sun on the bank. I had caught a few nice rainbows and browns in the 12-15" range earlier in the day and was in the zone in terms of casting and managing my drifts. The NC fish and game department stocked their brood stock trout in that section of the Watauga, and I saw several of them. I threw everything I had at them. The would move to investigate, then decide against eating my fly at the last second, which was infuriating. Didn't they know I was in the zone? While I was trying for the big ones, I saw another, smaller fish rising repeatedly upstream. It was right at the upper limit of my casting range, which was maybe 40ft away or so at the time, and under some branches. I decided to go for it, did a quick, single false cast, then shot my line the rest of the way. It landed 6ft ahead of the rising fish without spooking it and in the right seam, and I managed to mend the drift perfectly over top of the fish despite all the water and currents between us. The trout shot out of the water and slammed the fly. The line came tight, the rainbow went ballistic and spent almost as much time out of the water as in it, but still I managed to land it. The rainbow was only a 16-incher and a good bit smaller than the brood fish I fiddled with earlier, but it was awesome nonetheless. At the moment I decided to cast at tell tale rings that told me that the fish was hungry, there was no separation between me, the stream, and the fish. There was just the one perfect connection. I called it quits after that because nothing else I did that day was going to top that moment. Well, at least not while I was standing in the stream, anyway.

[Yakfisher]

Most memorable fish was the 13lb citation sheepshead I caught on my first CBBT trip. Pinch and I rolled down there after watching the first Kayak Kevin dvd and just tried our luck.

[Memory Maker]

10 1/2 ft Blue Marlin on my Honeymoon June 1975 ....... he's on my wall

[ronaultmtd]

Like Bill said there are so many that stand out you can't pick just one unless you cast your first cast yesterday...my most memorial fight took place at the southeast lumps off the VA/NC coast- 12 hours and ten minutes from hookup to landing...hooked up at 10 p.m landed at 11:10 a.m. The following morning. My tackle was a custom built (by me) Lamiglas 5'6" standup tuna rod with a Penn aluminum spool 9/0 HS reel with 50# test Courtland Greep Spot braided Dacron. The leader was 12 feet of 1/16 stainless steel aIrcraft control cable attached to 9 feet of #9 galvanized machine chain with 16/0 welded eye tuna hook. The bait was a head off a fifty pound Amberjack discarded at the Rudee Inlet Sport Fishing Center fish cleaning station. The fish towed my boat eight miles south of the hookup...

[chimo]

Nothing too exotic or noteworthy but lots of memories I have no idea what my first fish would have been but a couple early ones come to mind.

My brother, dad and I taking the old row boat out before dawn on the opening morning of bass season, I was maybe 4 or 5 years old I threw a chartruse and silver jointed rapala out and before it even hit the water a bass jumped out of the water and slammed it Not really sure how big it was, maybe 15 inches, or if we even caught another fsh that day but I'll never forget that strike!

A 20 +/- inch brown trout that I caught across the road from my dads old house at about the same age. There is a pool there in a realatively small creek that I fished in all the time as a kid and still wet a line at every now and then I walked across the road to throw a silver blue fox spinner. The water was up and muddy and it was early spring and still pretty cold. My dad and brother didn't really think I was going to catch anything because of the conditions. After a few casts I get slammed by a nice fish and at first I think its just a big shiner that we always used to catch there (whitefish or something actually) but I get it up next to the wall and see its a trout! I yank it up the retaining wall and run dragging the fish behind me while yelling for my brother and dad! Its a wonder that it didn't break my line

Then theres the 5lb bass I caught when I was 8ish just before a thunder storm while fishing with my brother, a night where I caught probably 20 bass up to about 5lbs fishing off a dock at night at at around 8yrs old, the first time I ever had a carp on my line at about 13, The first and second muskie I ever caught, the first time I went steelhead fishing on my own, The first time I caught a Northern trolling a Rapala super shad rap, a five pound channel catfish that hit a spinner bait etc etc etc. Lots of good memories Good Fishin

Chimo

[chimo]

My tackle was a custom built (by me) Lamiglas 5'6" standup tuna rod with a Penn aluminum spool 9/0 HS reel with 50# test Courtland Greep Spot braided Dacron. The leader was 12 feet of 1/16 stainless steel aIrcraft control cable attached to 9 feet of #9 galvanized machine chain with 16/0 welded eye tuna hook. The bait was a head off a fifty pound Amberjack discarded at the Rudee Inlet Sport Fishing Center fish cleaning station. The fish towed my boat eight miles south of the hookup...

Wow, wow, wow!!!! And to think anything above 6lb tets line was heavy to me when I was a kid Lol! That really must have been something!

[ictalurus]

Like Bill said there are so many that stand out you can't pick just one unless you cast your first cast yesterday...my most memorial fight took place at the southeast lumps off the VA/NC coast- 12 hours and ten minutes from hookup to landing...hooked up at 10 p.m landed at 11:10 a.m. The following morning. The fish towed my boat eight miles south of the hookup...

Yikes! That's a Hemingway story if I ever heard one. Pretty awesome.

[J.A. Veil]

Like Bill said there are so many that stand out you can't pick just one unless you cast your first cast yesterday...my most memorial fight took place at the southeast lumps off the VA/NC coast- 12 hours and ten minutes from hookup to landing...hooked up at 10 p.m landed at 11:10 a.m. The following morning. My tackle was a custom built (by me) Lamiglas 5'6" standup tuna rod with a Penn aluminum spool 9/0 HS reel with 50# test Courtland Greep Spot braided Dacron. The leader was 12 feet of 1/16 stainless steel aIrcraft control cable attached to 9 feet of #9 galvanized machine chain with 16/0 welded eye tuna hook. The bait was a head off a fifty pound Amberjack discarded at the Rudee Inlet Sport Fishing Center fish cleaning station. The fish towed my boat eight miles south of the hookup...

Ron -

What a fight! Do you have any photos of that fish?

[MetroMan]

Impressive Ron!


From my kayak, my most memorable fishwas my flounder that I caught last season at Kipto. No real story behind it.

[Memory Maker]

6lb bass from Loch Raven to win a fishing tournament ......... Randy Hunton and I had a stringer weight of 12 lb 13 oz that day and split a $600 pot that was the large fish and overall winner .............

Randy was very competitive and was obsessed with catching a bigger bass than me for over 5 years ........ he finally got a 6 lb 2 oz at Loch Raven .......

[ronaultmtd]

Yes, John, I do have a big picture (11X16) of the 797 pound Tiger Shark hanging from the scales at the Virginia Beach Fishing Center with me holding my baby Son hanging in my office at work. (it was a male with big shoulders and a slim belly- a female that size would have weighed well in excess of a thousand pounds)

Back then (early 80s) 99% of all my fishing was shark fishing and tournament shark fishing. Our club (Virginia Beach Sharkers) sponsored a yearly shark fishing tournament as well as participated in the VIMS and NFS shark tagging programs. I have caught, tagged and released scores of large sharks off the coast of Virginia/NC. We would get the girth measurement and use a china marker on the side of the boat as the overall length. Determining the sex was very easy- males have claspers, females don't. Species identification was very tricky and you had to really have your shark handbook with you at all times. There are 9 species of hammerheads...in the latter 1980s, we did not capture and weigh sharks unless we were convinced it was a new state record fish, as the resource was being reduced by commercial fishing...we were strictly tagging sharks.