Unexpected Catches: Weird Fish, Lost Items, and a Creepy Head

When going fishing, I’m always thinking of that next big fish that will get on the end of my net. Dreams of a trophy grayling or delicious salmon fill my thoughts as I cast a line out. Sometimes it’s not the fish I expect that ends up getting caught.

I’ve seen some surprising fish get caught in a multitude of situations. This winter, a client pulled an Alaskan blackfish from Chena Lake. These little fish are native to much of the interior yet rarely encountered. It was the first I had heard of being caught from the lake. In fact, they are not listed as being present on the ADFG lake database. In true client fashion, all they had to say was, “Can we eat it?”

This past spring, we went snagging for sockeye in Seward. We were a little early in the run so no salmon were caught, but I did accidentally snag a hooligan!

Perhaps the most surprising fish I’ve seen caught was a burbot on a fly. This is the only one I’ve heard of being caught while fly fishing, and it came as a complete accident. I was guiding a couple for grayling when the client’s fly slotted into a crack between us. I thought it had snagged on the rock, so I bent down to get it out for him. As I reached down, to my surprise, a small burbot came slithering out with a white streamer in its mouth! Needless to say, I was much more excited about the event than the client. He failed to realize he had maybe just made history as the first to catch a burbot on a fly.

It’s not just weird or unexpected fish we sometimes catch, sometimes it’s something else. Put a line in the water enough, and sooner or later that hook will get caught on something down on the bottom. No, I’m not talking about a rock or a log, something else entirely. I’ve seen some weird and surprising catches over the years. Some funny, some downright terrifying…

Many objects fall down the holes while ice fishing: fishing poles, ice scoops, bait jars, car keys, phones, etc. We almost always get the large items back, such as the fishing poles. However, we have successfully recovered a set of car keys.

And an iPhone!

Clients and I get a kick out of catching these objects. They typically think they have a big fish on, and their look of confusion when they pull out something completely different is priceless.

THE HEAD

The strangest, most unexpected, and downright terrifying catch came the first summer I was here in Alaska. I was guiding a father and his two young kids for Pike. We were fishing a slough off the Chena River. Suddenly, the father said he had got something. His pole was bent over, and he was reeling whatever it was in. It came into view through that dirty water, and we all just about had a heart attack. A HEAD! Damn, that was a scary sight. Long, dark women’s hair with a dirty, decaying scalp rose from the depths. The hair covered the face as he hauled it up over the side of the raft. Since I was the guide, I suppose it was my duty to part the hair and either confirm or deny what we were all fearing. Thank God that was just a creepy doll’s head.

While we were all relieved we weren’t living the opening scene of an NCIS episode, the fun wasn’t over. The two little kids were pretty freaked out, and told me with much excitement that, “You are totally going to be haunted now dude, you touched her!” Well, I know a haunting when I see one, and I assured them that since their father had caught her, she’d be haunting them all the way back to Missouri! I put her on a wooden post coming out of the water, and we continued on our way. The next time I went down there, she wasn’t there anymore. She must’ve rolled back in for someone else to dredge up someday.

I suppose you never quite know what you might catch when you head out fishing. I certainly wouldn’t expect to catch a phone or a head, but sometimes that happens. Guess we just have to put a line in the water and see what comes out!