I know a guy who put his stringer on the water to see if it floated-it didn't.

I know a guy who put a fish on the stringer...then threw the stringer overboard....huh, as if it was attatched to the canoe!

I lip landed my first pike. Needless to say it produced an amazing number of razor cuts that just wouldn't quit dripping blood. had to sit there in the boat and squeeze the thumb with my other hand for about 45 min while my brother and his buddy caught one after another...

I've seen my best friend put two hooks from a treble hook through his hand in the bow of my canoe, I caught a boot once that I was CONVINCED was a monster walleye (hooked it off the sloping point campsite on Silence). Hmm, my other paddling buddy was trolling once and gave up because he wasn't getting anything and we were almost to camp. He reels up to find a 25" laker enjoying a ride   As for crazy stuff that has happened to me, other than the boot.....I can't think of anything personally that humbled me too too much. My uncle once hooked a bass and somehow managed to backlash a spinning reel (alcohol MAY have been a factor), when he finally fixed it the bass was still on. OH! I just remembered. I hooked a good sized trout on a lake in NY. The rod I was using had a line splice in it about 20 ft or so from the lure. Of course the knot broke and I lost the fish (it was a tournament to boot, and I'm fairly certain that fish would have EASILY won the big fish section). About 15 mins later we were trolling by the same area and on the depth finder, we marked a fish that had a long "string" trailing from it. Not 100% sure obviously, but I like to think that was my fish trailing the line and the sonar picked it up.

As I described in last summer's trip report, I was in the bow when we started having great success trolling back and forth near a narrows on Friday Bay. For reasons to this day I can't explain, at one point when we were turning around to make another pass, I laid my rod and reel across the bow. A wave kicked up my paddle and knocked my gear into the water and it sank like a stone  Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The funny post script was my partner in the stern quickly grabbed a large blaze-orange depth finder clip-on weight he had in his tackle box and clipped it to the nose of his crank bait in a frantic attempt to snag my sunken rod and reel. He encountered resistance and thought he might have actually been successful, but instead pulled up an 18-inch walleye  So much for presentation 

solotripper wrote on Jul 18^th, 2011 at 2:40pm:

Clever!  I like!  Think I'll try this.

Last year my wife and 2 other couples were in Brent Lake and the 3 boys decided to do a little fishing the last hour of the day. I was in the stern and trying to fish with my buddy in the middle and his son in law up front. After a while I got tired of trying to keep the canoe positioned and fish so I just reached behind me and set my pole down bottom first and just as I let it go I knew what I had done. I saw the tip slowly sink out of sight. My buddy was very sympathetic or was that a laughing spasm that he had?  What was I thinking? .....I did have a spare

A guy in our group wasn't sure if his new diving minnow lure floated or not, so he placed it in the water next to the canoe.  About 1/2 second after he learned it was a sinking minnow plug he also realized that this test would have been best done AFTER tying the line to the lure.  Lure lost, lesson learned.

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I did almost the same thing one year, fortunately for me, my drag was set light enough that I was able to grab it before it went into the drink.

I still set my drag light, but also clip a side-lock carabiner to stem of reel and secure with short length of para-cord.
If I hook a fish its easy enough to un-clip.
I can't think of a more aggravating thing to happen than lose a rod in such a preventable manner

We left half the rods on a portage, twice, two different trips.  Half of each rod, except mine which I insist on taking responsibility for.  The thin half.  Dispatched two to hump back & retrieve.


Just this past May we paddled past a couple old guys trolling the shoreline.  We chatted a bit, exchanged tips.  Old guy in the stern wasn't paying attention, wasn't holding his rod.  He caught a snag, the rod popped out of the canoe and was gone in seconds.  I felt so sorry for the guy.  Secure your gear!