Amazing Fishing Stories III

We had good feedback for our “Amazing Fishing Stories” series. Some submissions were amazing, some were heartwarming and some were even a little goofy. But most of them were compelling in one way or another. Here are the favorites selected by the content staff here at FLWOutdoors.com. Enjoy, happy holidays and keep on fishing.

– FLWOutdoors.com staff

Serpent’s revenge
by Ted Angers, Clinton Township, Mich.

It was late afternoon of my third practice day for the first Everstart Series Northern Division tournament on the Mississippi River in La Crosse, Wis. This was my first experience in this area and, up to this point, practice had been anything but productive.

Frustrated and tired, I was working my way down some uncharted narrow sloughs, determined to find a secret honey hole. The narrow sloughs twisted and turned through a jungle of trees, brush and tall grass with gnarly looking old logs sticking up out of the water everywhere. I had worked my way into a hidden little cove that had a small creek running along one side of it. There was what looked like a deep hole where the creek entered the cove. I used my electric trolling motor to work my way across the cove towards the promising-looking hole. To my surprise the current of the creek was much stronger than I expected. As soon as my boat entered the current it was quickly swept downstream and onto a sandbar. After a 20-minute battle, using a paddle and my 36-volt trolling motor, I finally worked my way off the bar and back into the calmer water of the cove.

Totally exhausted and now frustrated more than ever, I sat down wondering what I was doing here. It was then that I noticed a large brown snake swimming across the cove.

Personally, I am scared to death of snakes and do everything possible to avoid them, but for some reason that day I decided to pick up a spinnerbait rod and fling a cast towards the snake. It was a beautiful roll-cast with the blade of the spinnerbait barely grazing the snake’s head. Standing there on the front deck admiring myself for the accurate cast, my pride quickly turned to horror when the snake turned and came at the boat like a guided missile. So fast was the snake that before I could react it was already halfway up the trolling motor shaft. In a panic, I took a swing at the serpent with my favorite spinnerbait rod, missing it completely and snapping off the end of the rod against the bow of the boat. The snake’s menacing-looking head was at the top of the trolling motor when I made a desperate kick for the trolling-motor switch. Unfortunately, I had failed to shut the high bypass off after the previous sandbar incident. The motor safety delay worked perfectly, delaying the full power surge one second before launching me completely over the bow of the boat and into the water with the snake.

I wish someone would have caught my acrobatic re-entry into the boat on videotape; it surely would have rivaled anything “Flipper” had ever done. I am not sure how it worked, but I came straight out of the water and back onto the deck in the blink of an eye, almost snapping my neck as I looked back to see if the snake was coming with me.

The author of this piece, Ted Angers, is a pro competitor on the EverStart Series and Wal-Mart BFL.