Why fishing stories are the best stories

An Irish fisherman reeled in a six-foot-wide set of antlers. They turned out to be from the extinct Irish Elk. Trollers fishing for tuna off the North Carolina coast snagged a million dollars worth of cocaine instead.

An Arizona lake fisherman caught a fishing pole he had lost to a big catfish earlier in the year. And a fisherman in Texas snagged a small line which he pulled in to find it attached to a chain. After pulling in the chain he found a small aluminum boat with a 25 horse outboard attached. After fixing it up and using it for three years he gave it to the Boy Scouts.

A few years ago a longliner from Kodiak named Seamus was on a grinding halibut trip in the western Aleutians. The fish were few and far between, and the crew was ready to call it a season. As he nodded at the rail at the end of a long day of hauling gear, he saw a decent sized halibut flashing its way to the surface.

Grabbing his gaff, he landed the flapping flatfish, and as he did he noticed something unusual.

Instead of salmon or herring, the hook was baited with a plastic Ziploc bag. Nothing else, just a plastic bag. And the bag seemed to have something in it. After shaking the fish off the hook, Seamus opened the bag and found a note inside. The note read “Seamus Go Home.” It had been put there by one of the crew. It was the only hook that caught a halibut on that tub of gear. 

Then there is the story about the Japanese fishing trawler that was sunk by a falling bovine. This story goes back at least to the late 1990s, when I read about it.

That version goes like this: A Russian rescue ship plucked four crewmen from a sunken Japanese fishing boat in the Sea of Japan. They detained them immediately after hearing their explanation for being there. To a man they all insisted that a cow had fallen from the skies, striking their trawler amidships and resulting in its rapid sinking.

They were detained for a number of weeks, until investigators were able to get the crew of a Russian army cargo plane to fess up. It seems they had landed on a remote airstrip in the Kuril Islands. The ownership of these Islands, which stretch from the southernmost Japanese Island toward the Sea of Okhotsk, has been a matter of dispute between Japan and Russia since World War II.

So, just to assert their claim that they own it, the Russians fly regular trips to an airstrip they built on one of them, an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere. Like some islands in the Aleutians, the only residents are wild cows left over from a failed ranching venture. The Russian aircrew was flying a cargo plane, like a big C-130, with a drop-down ramp in the back.

Somehow they herded one of the cows into the plane, then lifted up the gate. Presto! Free beef. But as they climbed to around 30,000 feet the cow began to get agitated. Like its Aleutian brethren, they have big horns and can be quite frisky. As the cow began to tear up the inside of the plane the crew decided their only option was to open the back and put the plane into a steep climb, which they did. The cow flew out the back, and they figured their troubles were over until the investigators arrived.

This story has been widely questioned, but so are stories about sea monsters. Yet they clearly exist. One of the most well reported is the Iliamna Lake Monster, or “Illy.” This creature, which is reported to be a blunt-headed, aluminum-colored fish 10- to 30-feet in length, was known to the

Aleut and Tlingit peoples, and has been spotted by numerous floatplane pilots over the years.

A vertical tail and side-to-side swimming motion are universally noted by witnesses, so the creatures are not beluga whales, which do sometimes swim into the lake. Many have speculated that Illy is a white sturgeon, which does reach 20 feet in length, and fit the general description. But no sturgeon has ever been caught in the lake. At 77 miles long, with a maximum depth of 988 feet, Lake Iliamna is big enough to keep its secrets.

Another widely reported creature is Cadborosaurus, or “Caddy,” which inhabits the North Pacific. It is described as having distinctive humps, and a large “horse-like” head. This creature is also well known to indigenous peoples up and down the West Coast.

There have been over 300 sightings of Caddy in the past 200 years. Fisherman Kelly Nash reportedly filmed several minutes of the creatures cavorting in Nushagak Bay. Salmon setnetters near Harvester Island in Kodiak have reported seeing them offshore for days at a time, but they swim away when approached by a skiff.

And, in full disclosure, 15 years ago my wife and I saw three of the creatures swimming around Cape Chiniak. They were 20- to 30-feet long, with large heads and a series of dark humps. Over a period of 20 minutes we watched them with wonder. They were good swimmers, and seemed to be making about 10 knots. The humps did not undulate, they remained steady, following the large, lighter-colored head, which appeared to have feathers, or whiskers.

As we watched they disappeared into the Gulf of Alaska, which is also big enough to keep a few secrets.

Terry Haines was a commercial fisherman in Kodiak for more than 30 years. He now produces the Alaska Fisheries Report for KMXT and is a member of the Kodiak City Council. He can be reached at thaines@city.kodiak.ak.us