what is your most memorable....

[flytire 0]

....lost fish to date?

 

mine is an extremely large brown trout from the big horn river in montana

 

 

[mikechell 0]

Of course, this is the largest Tarpon I hooked during the Tarpon tournament a couple of years ago. This picture was taken by a tourist on a passing cruise ship. You can see me and my boat being "thrown", in the upper left corner. That HAS to be my most memorable.

 

 

 

 

Other than that one, I've lost many, many fish. I definitely do not remember any particular one as a "special" lost fish.

[Steeldrifter 0]

About 5 years ago on the Au Sable I was fishing on a high bank where I could not get down to the water easily. A 6" rainbow took my dry fly and I was standing there looking for a way to slide down the bank to the water to grab him and let him go. As he's flopping on the surface of the water a twenty plus inch brown trout (22"-24" from the looks) came out of nowhere and grabbed him. The brown was not hooked because the small bow had the hook but he actually swallowed the bow 100% down his own throat. My buddy was wading upstream to help net the brown after I yelled for him. I had the brown on for at least 60 seconds. Just as my buddy reached to net the brown it spit the little bow out and slide back into the deeper water. The little rainbow was fine even after being swallowed whole. I unhooked him and he swam away probably scared to death, but alive.

 

I'll never forget that one.

[ihang10 0]

I don't know about one, but I remember the time my Dad gave me the job of pulling up the fish basket after a morning of lake fishing. It was full, tough to say how many.

 

Needless to say, I forgot, the basket eventually broke off at some point. The line for it was hanging over the gun wall when we docked. My Dad asked what I did with the basket, where did it go? "I guess it's on the bottom" was my answer. Man that was a lot of fish, that much I do remember.

[agn54 0]

I have several memorable ones, mostly large snook. On the fly it is probably something I hooked on the flats that took off and began pulling the boat. It broke the leader so I have no idea what it was and out there it could have been a number of different things, but it felt like a submarine

[TheCream 0]

A few years ago I lost a large wild brook trout in WV. Trophy citation size in WV for brookies is 15", this fish was probably in the 14-15" range and would have been my biggest wild brookie in WV. It was mid summer, low water, long cast, I was fishing a #20 Griffith's Gnat on my 3wt. I saw the sip, set the hook and the fish exploded out of the water. I remember plain as day seeing that bright belly, orange and red, then the fly sailing back at me. Gone. That's still the only fish I ever had to stop fishing after losing to "collect my thoughts" for a few minutes.

[Fisherboy0301 0]

A bass that would've gone 15+lbs. I was bed fishing in Lake George Fl. A large PB&J Jig. Conventional fishing. I hooked the fish, and fought and fought and fought her. But she won, threw the jig. I stopped fishing and just sat there looking at the little circle of sand on the canal bottom. I checked day after day to see if she'd return to the best, but she never did.

[Adam Saarinen 0]

You always remember the fish that get away more then the ones you land! The one that haunts me has to be the firsr salmon i had hooked! Thought i was stuck on a rock on the bottom again, but the rock started to move, almost 1m salmon jumped almost 1m into the air & i froze! It spat it!

[ditz2 0]

My most memorable was several years before I even knew about fly fishing. I was about 10 years old and I 'borrowed' dad's spinning outfit. The reel was loaded with some kind of thin braid line. I was fishing a deep pool of a smallish creek and drifting an unweighted crawday tail down stream from the bank which was above water level about 6'. I hook a 7 or 8# carp and it ran up and down the creek. About half way thru the fight the reel came loose from the rod because of those darn sliding mounting rings on the cork handle. I managed to save the fish and got the reel back on the rod. I finally got the fish to the waters edge and it took one flop and broke the rotten line and swam off.

 

I won't relate two other stories but one involves another carp and the other a huge sucker of some sort. I still like rough fish fishing.

[shoebop 0]

I was fishing a Canadian Shield lake one year and that lake was full of 40"+ (20 + pounders). Well, I almost caught one...if I had only been there a day before. Does that count?

[Bryon Anderson 0]

My dad and his sister, my Aunt Joy, came up from Missouri (my home state) to visit me in Michigan back in 2001 or '02, somewhere in there. Neither of them had ever seen any of the Great Lakes before and really had no conception of how truly enormous they are or anything like that. Aunt Joy, especially, was blown away. My dad's family was the picture of rural poverty when he and Joy were growing up -- they didn't have a toilet or bathtub in the house until Dad was in high school, in the mid-'60's, if that tells you anything. Joy had stayed put after high school, living on her mom and dad's place, a few hundred yards from the house she'd grown up in. She walked to work at a shoe factory every day and walked back home at night, for 30-some years. So this trip to Michigan, for her, was literally the trip of a lifetime. Joy loved to fish, and more than anything, she wanted to fish in Lake Michigan and catch a big fish.

Well, being a budding fly fisher, I had never so much as dipped a line in "the big lake" except once or twice when my father-in-law took me out on his boat for salmon. I knew zilch about lake fishing. I figured our best shot, given my ignorance, was to hit the bait shop and fish off the pier.

We ended up with a bucket of shiners and a bucket of crayfish. Dad and I baited up on spinning rods and Joy fished what she'd fished all her life: her little Zebco Model 33 spincaster. I think the rod was maybe 4 1/2 or 5 feet long. The reel would have been well matched against a bluegill or a modest-sized bass or catfish.

She found the biggest, gnarliest crawdad in the bucket and speared him on her hook and lobbed the mess into the water. We hadn't been standing there five minutes when she started to jump and whoop and wave the rod around. the rod was bent to the absolute extremes of its ability to bend. The reel was screaming and rattling in its seat like it was about to fly apart (which it probably was). Joy flipped out and shoved the rod at me. "I don't know what to do!" she shrieked, but it was a joyous shriek, like a little girl being tickled by her favorite uncle. I took the rod.

The fish was a sheepshead, and I'd bet my last nickel it was 20 pounds if it was an ounce. This was the biggest, nastiest fish I'd ever seen in my life, thrashing the water into foam at the foot of the breakwall we were fishing off of, a good 5 or 6 feet below us. We had no net. Before I could solicit the help of one of the pier regulars and their long handled net, my dad gets down on his belly, hanging perilously far out over the wall, grabs the line, and starts pulling in the fish, going hand over hand with the line. I don't believe I'd ever seen him so motivated in my life. He WANTED that fish. "Dad!" I said. "It's not a salmon! It's just a trash fish." "Well, I want it," is all he would say.

One more grab-and-haul on the line and he would have had it, too, but decades-old monofilament, 20-pound fish and tall seawalls are a recipe for what happened next: snap! splash! Awwww....

It wasn't technically my lost fish, but I'll never forget it.

[WVUontheFLY 0]

I was fishing one of my musky spots in WV that suffered a fish kill and is in the recovery process, flourishing recovery process. So I have seen many smaller <36" fish but never anything larger than that. I had a small, ~24", musky chasing the fly and I saw his mouth open to inhale the fly and I gave a too eager strip set and thought I missed the fish. I looked to where I last saw the little bugger to find that a monstrous 45"+ musky had T-Boned the small musky and literally swam at my feet to show that he got to eat that day and I did not... My buddy was filming with my gopro and I just drop the rod into the water and had a slight meltdown. Needless to say I called it quits for the day and returned back to the car. Also I got skunked that day, salt in the wound haha

[Matt7082 0]

Steelhead. This past fall on a Northern NY river, I hooked my first steelhead while targeting large browns. I never understood the hype about steelhead fishing. When my indicator twitched, I set the hook, and the fight lasted about 10 seconds......maybe less. I was so impressed with the speed and power the fish had. The it came clear out of the water a couple of feet and broke me off. The fish was easily over 10lbs. Not sure how big of a SH that is to most standards...but it was certainly a big fish in my book comparing it to the fish we see in our local rivers here in CT.

[Philly 0]

It still haunts me. I was fishing the White River in Vermont. I had been upstream fishing for trout but had moved down to the main stem. Remember that. Here the trout water turns into smallie water. I had found a deep pool at the bottom of some riffle water. I switched over to an estaz bug and had something flash at. I switched over to a sinking line and tied on a large white woolly bugger and made a couple of casts letting the line sink and the fly move in the current. Third cast I saw the line moving and set the hook, and the biggest smallmouth I'd ever seen jumped about 20 feet from me. It made a second jump and the tippet parted. I just plopped down on the gravel and shook my head. Having caught a couple of 20 inch fish, up in Canada. I figure this one was in the 24 to 26 inch range and had realized that being lazy I hadn't changed my tippet. I was fishing 4X or 5X.

[bowmike 0]

Lost an ungodly Pennsylvania brownie last year. Was indicator fishing a fast run into a large hole under a bridge. My indi took off up stream and I set the hook. My 10' 4 wt was nearly yanked from my hand. I had him on for about 4-5 minutes and tried to get him to the slower water to even the odds. I feel he was a wild brown. his fins were huge and the fish was about 24-26" long. He came up and I tried to turn him and my barbless hook popped out. I never go to return to try for him again. Was truly a PA river monster.