After dinner, we headed down the French to the spot where our first follow came. Funny thing was, at dinner, we told anyone who’d listen that we were gonna get our first ski that night. Did we ever. We had only been casting for a short time and all of a sudden I see this TAIL come out of the water about 4 feet from my suick. At first, I wasn’t sure the fish even hit my suick. I leaned back a little and watched my rod tip head south. Then I really leaned back, buried the hook and after realizing that my 65 pound power pro was stripping, I belted out a “wahoooooo!, this is a big fish!”. She took a couple deep runs, stripping off line. My drag was perfect. She never jumped. After about 10 minutes of heart pumping runs, she nicely presented twice along side the boat.

I can’t print Tony’s (my brother)comments when he saw the fish. He grabbed for the net . . guess what? We only had our rubber walleye net. It was small and heavy. We switched on the dock with my dad and uncle to give them a lighter net and now we were stuck. What the hell, we tried it anyways.

Too bad for us, the fish didn’t cooperate and we got barely more than Ľ of the fish in the net and, no kiddin, the front treble of the suick got stuck in the net. The fishin gods were with us though and the hooks popped right out. The net was tossed aside and we reevaluated. The gaff? Not us, we’d screw that up and probably hurt the fish. Only one thing left to do. Tony thought to himself, “commit to getting this fish in the boat”. He did. He reached over the side of the boat, slid his hand under the gill plate that didn’t have 9 inches of wood and 3 large trebles in it, and hoisted that girl over the side of Tony’s practically brand new 19 foot bassboat.

The tail of the tape was 50.5 inches. Didn’t pinch the tail but didn’t care. We were still shaking. We took some quick pics on the boat. Well, here she is (keep in mind that I weigh over 250 pounds and wear a size 50 suitcoat):