Unusual Catches While Fishing?

[Flyfisher for men]

A rock when I was a kid, numerous clams, a few beer cans.

  

[DADAKOTA]

Found a blue heron one morning with a wing tangled in fishing line which had cut to the bone.  Line was tangled in water willow so the bird was permanently tethered.  Beached the boat and threw my net over the heron.  Was able to cut the line and free the wing.  Surprisingly after a few minutes the heron took flight.  Was floating the Sac below Stockton and came upon a family group of geese in a little backwater.  One gosling was in distress and the goose was honking up a storm.  Figured the little one was snagged with a hook or line so I jumped out of the canoe and waded to it.   Got to the gosling and started to lift it out of the water and was shocked to find a snapping turtle attached to its leg.  Turtle finally released the broken leg and the gosling swam back to the flock.

[Flysmallie]

I tried to rescue a goose on Stockton one day. He was in the back of a little cove all tangled up in line. I jumped out of the boat to lend him a hand and that's when all hell broke loose. We both fought for our lives before I was able to get back in the boat and leave. Coyotes have to eat too. 

[Johnsfolly]

I've caught small snapping turtles. The largest turtle was a loggerhead sea turtle off the beach in Jupiter FL. Before I saw the turtle my rod would lunge lunge lunge then break. Then repeated until I pulled it into the surf zone. Once in the surf it opened its mouth and spit the bait😌. Thank goodness it never had the hook set and was just kept its mouth closed.

Still in FL I fished a drainage slough with 3 inch sluggos. Nearly stepped on a small gator. It swam off. I was fishing that sluggo and the gator ate the bait. It had its head up and it was "chewing" the bait. Once it opened its mouth again I tried to flip out the bait which set the hook in its tongue😟. Not much of a fight. Came in like a towel. About 4 lomg. I snapped the line once I got it near the bank.

[FishnDave]

I had a buddy in my boat using a topwater lure, and a blue heron flew out from along the shore to repeatedly try to land in the deeper water as it was zeroing in on that lure!

And I watched an adult duck raising Cain on the other side of the city pond...in the water, but not too far from shore.  Splashing and flapping and squawking...I fished my way around to it...by the time I got there, it was still on the surface, but dead.  I thought maybe its foot was caught, so I poked around under it with my rod tip.  A snapping turtle had hold of the ducks foot.  I presume it had hold, and the duck struggled until it died from exhaustion...it didn't really get pulled under and drowned.  Bizarre.

[Johnsfolly]

Ok snapper story. As kids my brother and I caught a decent sized snapper and took it home. At our house you could keep animals if you could get them to eat. No luck with this snapper. So it had to go. Instead of dragging way back to the lake where we caught it, we took it to a couple of ponds across the highway. Well these were private ponds and the owner raised exotic waterfowl and had big brook trout in the spring creek feeding these ponds. Did not deter us from releasing a nasty predator into the pond. We dumped the turtle. It swam away deeper than we could see it. There was a wood duck with three ducklings swimming in the pond. Not long after we saw the last of the turtle one of the ducklings disappeared😌. Oops!

[Gavin]

Caught an owl on a Jitterbug. Lost a little bit of blood and ruined a shirt releasing it. I also caught a bat on a dry fly during a guided drift boat trip in Ontario. My guide took care of that one.

 

[Quillback]

I think I've told this story on here several years ago, but here's a rerun.

I was on a guided trip with a couple of guys from work off the west coast of Vancouver island.  We were trolling for cohos, and it was one of those deals where the guide set up the baits on downriggers.  What he'd do was take a preserved anchovy that he marinated in some kind of proprietary concoction, rig it on a treble hook, let out about 50 feet of line, attach the line to a downrigger ball, and then drop the ball down about 30 feet.  Well when he let the line out there was a few seconds of time where that anchovy was sitting on top the water before he could get the line attached. One time when he was going through this process a sea gull swooped in, grabbed the anchovy and got hooked.

So the guide, who apparently had this happen before, just dropped the ball down (the gull did not pull the line out of the release), taking the gull down under water.  He left it there for a minute or so, brought up the ball, and handlined the gull in.  The gull was about half dead and didn't resist at all when he de-hooked it.  So we started to troll away, leaving the gull sitting on top the water where it was sort of feebly flapping it's wings trying to fly.

About 10 other gulls showed up and started flying around the gull on the water swooping in on it from time to time and all of them were just screeching and making one heck of a racket.  I'm watching this, and all of a sudden the other gulls scatter, and an eagle swoops down and grabbed that poor gull and flew off with it.

Saw some whales on that trip also, I forget the type they were, but they were feeding on herring, they literally encircle a school of them, then they come up vertically from underneath the herring school until their heads would break out of the water, and they'd come up in unison in a circle.  

Now I didn't catch anything weird on that trip, saw some unusual stuff.

Caught a few ratfish in Puget Sound, that is one weird and ugly fish.

[kjackson]

Fishing in the saltchuck does lead to strange catches.  Fishing off the West Coast, I've caught ratfish, an octopus, sea cucumbers, had an oyster clamp down on a fly I dragged across it when it was open, and several different birds including a pelican (that one in Florida). But on a trip to Kodiak Island I ran into some fish I had no clue about. The rock greenling--the red thing in my avatar-- was a strange sight as it came up from the depths. It was extremely colorful--even had blue lips--that it was like a neon sign.  On that trip I caught a fish I won't even guess at that had really strange blue eyes. I've never hooked a seal or sea lion, but I've had them take hooked fish off my line. A friend had a seal grab a large floating Rapala when he was using it for black rockfish. 

[Johnsfolly]

@Quillback those were probably humpback whales. They are the most common whales that do the bubblenetting trick to eat the herring. Haven't seen that myself. Would be pretty cool sight.