At long last the local river has returned to decent levels. Fishin' pard' and I put the canoe in and began chucking top waters at the local smallmouth population. It turned out to be one of those days. On my third cast, my spook got popped and a dinker tried to go all airborne on me. My next cast yielded zilch as did every cast for the next hour and a half. Unusual for him, pard got skunked. As we returned to the launch site, we passed 3 boulders that broke the flow and created a small eddy. I fired a jig right on target and promptly got "snagged." We paddled over to the rocks, but when we got there, the line had moved about 10 feet to the left. I felt the pull of something really heavy. It reversed its path, ran under the canoe and headed down stream with us in hot pursuit. A few minutes later we were directly atop of it and it decided to come up and see what all the bother was. I was eyeball to eyeball with a doormat sized soft shell turtle with a nasty attitude. Now, on a short line, it again shot under the canoe and with a pop, my high end spinning rod went snap about 4 inches from the tip. Turtle got away, (thankfully), and instead of a medium lite action I've got a medium action "turtle rod"....some morning.
fish on,
rivereddy