Rat Man
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It was a beautiful late Spring day. I was fishing with Bob Messer, the brother of Karl mentioned in my first story. We were fishing in Batsto Lake, a gorgeous cedar water lake far back in The Pines. This was many years ago when we still sometimes used live bait.… possibly forty years ago. By then we had learned to fish in the weeds, not near them, to catch the big ones. I was fishing with a few lures and Bob had just baited up a minnow and bobber. He cast backwards over his shoulder as far back in the weeds as he could. "All right, genius, what are you going to do if you hook a really big one back in that muck?" Suddenly Bob started reeling like mad. I was watching him thinking that he was just pulling on weeds. I'm like "You know better than to make your drag scream like that over some hooked lily pads." Then I realized it wasn't weeds. He'd hooked something quite huge. We were both using only six pound test line so I figured his chance of getting whatever it was out of the weeds was just about zero. Bob stayed with it and played it well. He got the fish just barely outside of the pads then his line broke. I cast some kind of lure at the fish. He took it and broke my line too. I had another rod rigged with a Bomber Model A Crank Bait, Green Fire Tiger in color, about 1/4 oz. I casted to where the fish last was. He must have been hungry because once again he hit. Though I was using light line, this time he was in clear water and I had a chance. I fought him up to the side of the boat. It was a Pike, the only one I've ever seen in Batsto Lake. Usually we catch Pickerel and Bass there. He was as big as my leg. Bob had the net ready and tried to scoop him up. His head barely fit in our net. You can't imagine how stupid and helpless we felt. Here was the fish of a lifetime that we both could share credit for and we couldn't land him. He looked at us with distain, flipped us the fin, broke my flimsy line, and was gone. This actually ties into my first story because from that day on I always took a ridiculously large net with me. It was because of this incident that I was able to land the Moby Pick from my first story ten years later.
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