My wife has a haunting tale. Every fathers day we head up to Drummond Island in Michigan's Upper peninsula. The year before this past, during a lazy afternoon, my wife, then 4 yr old daughter, and my old man, were on the boat dock. Using a kids pole with a broken reel, my wife and daughter were casting a jig with crappie nibbles, trying to entice the rock bass. My daughter lost interest, and they were packing up, when my wife made the always vital "one more cast". She let the jig sink a second, then it was HAMMERED(her words not mine), by the biggest fish of her life. She was able to maneuver the broken reel enough to get the line close to my old man. He then started pulling the fish in the remaining distance by the line. He knelt down on the dock, reached in to lip the fish, and proceeded to dump the contents of his pocket into the water. His reading glasses, pocket scratch note pad, ink pen, and the ever important can of chew, dumped into the lake. In all the commotion, and the reflex action to catch his stuff, he didn't keep a firm grasp on the fish. It fell back to the lake, spitting the jig as it hit the water. Never to be seen again.
My old man claims it was probably the biggest bass he's ever laid hands on. My wife tells the story like it was a giant tuna she reeled in.
Every time we go back up to Drummond, the first thing she does is grab a pole and the nibbles, and head back to that same dock, cast to the same spot, and hope she can give proof to her story.
Here fishy, fishy, fishy...