A Reddit user said the whole thing happened while he was fishing from a kayak on Caddo. According to his comment in the thread, the day had been going great up to that point. He was catching keepers — redear, bluegill, pumpkinseed, warmouth — and he was in a good mood because the bite was steady. Then he hooked another nice bluegill. He said the fish surfaced about 20 yards from the kayak and jumped like a bass, which already struck him as odd because it was not something he was used to seeing a bluegill do. Then the fish dove.
What happened next was fast enough that he laid it out almost like a sequence of impacts. He described a strong pull, the rod bending hard, the rod tip going to the water’s surface, then the reel going to the water’s surface. Whatever had the bluegill passed under the kayak. Then the kayak flipped, and whatever-it-was yanked him into the water with it. In the middle of all that, he realized a second ugly truth: he had never actually practiced getting back into the kayak from the water.
He said only a few seconds had passed when he finally got his arms over the overturned hull and looked up. He could see the swell on the surface moving away from him, with his rod and reel going with it. In his own mind, that part was easy to accept. He was not interested in chasing the gear at that point. He wanted whatever had flipped him to keep going. He stayed there in the water clinging to the upturned kayak, trying and failing to remount it, while taking stock of what he had lost and what kind of trouble he was really in. There was no cell signal in the area, and his phone was gone anyway.
He wrote that at least he had done one thing right: he was wearing a decent PFD. He also had a whistle. So he spent what he guessed was about an hour treading water, trying unsuccessfully to climb back onto the kayak, before finally accepting that he was going to need help. Then he spent roughly another half-hour blowing the whistle and hoping somebody would hear it. He was out there the whole time in water he knew held alligators and big snapping turtles, which only made the wait worse.
Eventually two older men in a jon boat passed near the area, heard the whistle, and came over to help him. They got him back aboard the kayak and, according to his retelling, gave him a few very direct observations afterward. The one he remembered most was basically: there are big gators and snapping turtles in Caddo, and staying in the boat would have been a good idea. He said he listened, agreed, and took the lesson.
That was the story he told. He was catching panfish from a kayak when a hooked bluegill suddenly acted wrong, something powerful grabbed it underwater, passed under the kayak, flipped the boat, and pulled him into the water. He never clearly identified what took the fish, lost his rod and reel, spent about an hour trying to remount the overturned kayak, then another stretch blowing a whistle until a pair of men in a jon boat heard him and got him back on board.
What do you think — if something under the water flipped your kayak hard enough to throw you out and drag your rod away, would you ever fish that spot the same way again?
Original Reddit post: What is your most terrifying fishing story?
