A Reddit user said one of the weirdest fishing run-ins he ever heard came from his dad. According to his comment in the thread, his dad was fly fishing while wading a river that ran along the edge of private property. He was already out in the water, doing what he had gone there to do, when he slipped and fell. The current grabbed him and started dragging him downstream before he could get his footing back. So right away this was not just a mild stumble or an embarrassing splash. He was in moving water, off balance, and fighting to get upright again while the river kept carrying him.
As he was being swept downriver, he apparently crossed what the commenter called the “imaginary property line” along that stretch of river. That was when a woman came out and started yelling at him. Not after he got to shore. Not once he was standing on dry land and could sort out what had happened. She came out while he was still clearly being dragged by the current and began shouting that he was not allowed to fish there. The commenter wrote that she was screaming, “Hey, you can’t fish here!” while his dad was literally struggling in the river.
His dad yelled back the only thing that made sense in that moment: “Can I drown here?”
That was the line the commenter remembered, and it tells the whole story. The man was not standing on the bank arguing over access rights or trying to push his luck on a posted shoreline. He was in the water, being carried downstream, trying to stay upright and not get himself hurt or worse, while someone on shore chose that exact moment to enforce her personal version of the property line.
The commenter did not drag the story out much beyond that, but the picture is already clear enough. A fly fisherman loses his footing in current, gets swept downstream, crosses into the stretch of river next to private land, and instead of getting concern or even just silence, he gets yelled at for being in the wrong place while he is still obviously trying not to drown. In the same thread, other people jumped in to talk about how river-access law works in their states, saying that on navigable rivers the waterway is often public even if the banks are private. But the original story itself was just that ugly little moment in the current: a man trying to keep his head above water while someone on shore decided that was the perfect time to complain about where he was fishing.
What do you think — if you slipped in a river and got swept onto the stretch beside private land while someone on shore yelled that you couldn’t fish there, would you even have words left besides what his dad said?
Original Reddit post: Let’s hear your run ins with crazy people.
