Well, I broke my brother in law’s rod yesterday fishing with him. But it’s part of the end of a good story.
We were fishing on the outside coast. My brother in law’s son in law was in town, so he invited me to along on their fishing trip. The weather looked good that day, then was gonna blow up. I rarely go outside to fish but the seas looked okay so I gladly went along.
We were fishing for an hour and hadn’t caught a king salmon yet. Then my nephew gets a big fish on the one rod. As I bring in the other rod, we got a double! My fish feels a bit weird by the way it’s fighting – like maybe it’s a halibut or something.
My nephew continued playing his fish, and slowly works the fish closer to the boat. All of a sudden, we see his line and his flasher whizz by behind the outboards in the back of the boat – and I mean whizz by. Faster than any fish I’d ever seen. Turns out there was a good reason for that.
Out of nowhere, about 20 feet behind the boat, a HUGE sealion bull jumps vertically almost fully out of the water, with the big king salmon in his mouth! It happened so fast it took me a second to process what we just saw happen. It was like something out of a sci fi movie.
Then the sea lion ran with that fish across the props and broke off the flasher and lure and was gone!
I then bring my fish up, and it’s swimming, but sadly, it had no tail. A sea lion had bitten off the back of the fish, but it was still alive and swimming. As I lifted the rod, the end of the rod broke off and then the line broke at the flasher, so we lost all that gear, too. So, 2 kings on, and no kings in.
We might not remember the fish we caught this day, but you always remember the one that got away.