Great Catch & Release Story

[bartman]

I've been fishing for a long time and have plenty of fish stories but this one ranks up there.

I had a few hours to kill after work today so my son and I fished a local stream for a bit. He's fishing the run above me and I look up and he has a nice fish in his net and he's waving for me. I walk up and he has a nice native trout about 16 inches in the water inside the net.

He says "I didn't catch it, it fell out of the sky." I said "What the @@# ? "

He was switching nymphs and just happened to glance up and see this object falling from the sky and land about 10 feet from him in the grass. He walks over to the object, only to find a live trout lying there in the grass. He grabbed it and placed it in his net in the water. When I inspected the fish it had talon marks on it. Apparenty, a rather large bird of prey caught a nice trout and it dropped it 10 feet from my kid. What are the chances of that? If it dropped anywhere else, it would have surely died out of water. If he wasn't changing flies he wouldn't have seen it rain fish.

He never saw the bird but we're happy to report that the fish was just fine and swam off happliy.

How's that for a true fish story?

[jskowron]

Wow- what a thing to have happen!

[bscanman]

That is a great story-very cool, especially around here. My brother and I were fishing our way around northwest Montana several years back and spent a day floating around a lake full of cutthroat trout and grayling. We had the place to ourselves except for one bald eagle and one opsrey. We caought a LOT of fish with talon scars on their back. We also kept unofficial score-the osprey outfished the eagle 3 to 1 easily and the eagle was definately fumble-prone. Ben Franklin was right-the national bird should have been the wild turkey .