It seems a fairly safe bet that every man or woman who ever has wet a line has had at least one occasion when they were more than a little amused by the "other than a fish" specimen they ended up reeling in. Here are some that I found on the Internet:
We all know "bucketmouth" is one of several slang terms for a largemouth bass. Imagine the surprise of an angler, though, who once gave that nickname new meaning by landing an actual bucket while fishing the Hudson River. "I actually thought it was a fish," he said, "because I hooked it by the handle (on a jig) in current. It put up a good fight all the way to the boat, and I kept playing it like you would any big fish in current. Nobody was watching me, but I still embarrassed myself," he concluded.
Consider the case of a man who was fishing the Mississippi River in Minnesota when he snagged the skull and antlers of a bull elk. The thing was that elk hadn't lived in Minnesota in 150 years. According to scientists, the skull may have been 1,000 years old.
A coastal angler dropped his bait over the side of a boat, only to have something grab it and take off. He was clueless about what it might be until he reeled up a beer bottle full of octopuses. Reckon the one that had snatched his bait wanted to share with all his buddies.
While fishing a jig on the Arkansas River in Pine Bluff, a fella hooked something that took his line around a piling and hung him up. He made his way to where the hangup was and, once he had unwrapped everything, discovered that all he had left on the hook was a pair of men's drawers--Hanes, to be exact. The fish had long since departed.
Another angler described an incident in which he lost an anchor in a North Carolina lake. Three years later, he ended up hooking and retrieving the anchor close to the same spot. "The rope was in bad shape," he said, "but the anchor still was perfect."
On a night-fishing trip to a lake in North Dakota, an angler was dragging a crawler harness across the bottom for trout or walleye when he hooked and reeled in what appeared to be an animal skull--possibly that of a cat. "That was our sign that we were done fishing for the night," he said.
A Texas fisherman thought he had hooked the catfish of a lifetime. Turned out, though, that what he really had hooked was a submerged 50-gallon barrel. He managed to pull it up in 40 feet of water.
An Indiana angler was fishing a tournament on Kentucky Lake when he, too, hooked what appeared to be a pretty good fish, given the fight he was getting. His "big catch," however, proved to be nothing more than an aluminum lawn chair.
A Tennessee gent thought he had hooked a big striper while sauger fishing. "It twisted and turned with the strong current," he noted, "and its shiny glint could be seen in the depths as it refused to be subdued. Finally, however, after much lifting and reeling, it came to the waiting net"--an intact aluminum boat ladder, that is.
And last but certainly not least, by any stretch of the imagination, comes this report from Maine, where a guy was fishing the Kennebec River for striper. He was bank fishing when he saw what looked like a log in the river, and he heard a faint call of "Help!". The "log" turned out to be a young man who earlier had jumped into the river from a 114-foot bridge upstream. The angler called a 9-1-1 dispatcher, who told him to throw something to the man. The angler made a cast with his 7-foot spinning rod and 25-pound-test line. The topwater plug he threw landed beyond the victim, 35 yards offshore, but the angler managed to hook the desperate man's shirt. "It was a struggle to get him out of the current, so I could reel him in," said the angler. A police officer, responding to the 9-1-1 call arrived just in time to help pull the victim out of the water--in critical condition but alive.
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