4/22/17 Catch of the Day

I got out for a few hours to fish for Wipers again. I did manage to boat 3 with the biggest being only about 14" long. I had one nicer fish right to the boat before it made a few more last ditch runs and ended up coming off the hook. Mike was fishing as well and after catching two fish decided to call it a day shortly before dark. I decided to stay and cast a rattle trap after dark hoping to tie into a bigger fish. Just after the sun went down, I felt my lure get heavy about halfway through my retrieve. I set the hook and realized that I did not have a fish. There was weight on my line but it was not fighting back. I pulled my lure in not sure quite what to expect. I pulled it out of the water to find another lure hooked onto it. This is a pretty odd occurrence since I was just blind casting in open water. I unhooked the scatter rap from my rattle trap and started pulling line attached to the lure into the kayak. I thought that I would just pull in the remaining line and throw it all away when I got home. This is when things got interesting. All of a sudden the line started to get heavy and before I knew it I had pulled an entire rod and reel combination up off of the bottom of the lake! It looked fairly new and seemed like it had not been on the bottom of the lake for very long. I stuck it in my rod holder and took a picture that I then sent to Mike. I titled the picture "catch of the day!" before I sent it to him. About 15 minutes later I got a phone call. It was Mike. I answered the phone and he told me that the combination that I had found actually belonged to him! He had somehow dropped it into the lake on his trip the week before. He could describe the exact rod and reel and even lure so I knew he wasn't lying about it! Pretty crazy that not only did I manage to snag a rod and reel off the bottom of a 400 acre lake but it happened to belong to my friend. I don't know what the odds of this happening are but I can't imagine that they are very high!