Some Story! Ice Fishermen Hook…

‘Biggest Muskie?’

What’s about the last thing you’d ever expect to hook ice-fishing…in Minnesota?

“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful tip,
That happened in an icy hole…
…and almost gave a guy an asthma attack….”

Here you go, from startribune.com:

> “We got on the lake [Waconia] about 9 in the morning,” said Jeff Klein, 26. “We weren’t in our fish house long before a guy from another house not far away said he saw the biggest muskie of his life pass below his fishing holes, headed for us. He told us to get ready.”

> “All of the sudden, one line took off,” Klein said. “The line was running and running. Finally, I said, ‘I have to set the hook.’ And I did. Real hard. The hook busted.”

> Then his buddy’s lines flew off the reels. They both began to crank and Klein knelt on the floor, a gaff in one hand, peering into the dark water, ready to do battle.

> He was greeted by a mysterious air bubble that gurgled up from the water below. Followed by a…hand and arm. Holding a rope. “I jumped back to the other side of the house,” Klein said.

> One of his buddies, who is asthmatic, “was breathing so hard. He didn’t have his inhaler along and kept saying, ‘Hand me a cigarette. Hand me a cigarette.'” [That’s a good substitute for an inhaler?!]

> The anglers saw that the hand was attached to an arm, at the bottom of which, looking up, was a face with a mask on it.

> “We figured he needed help and we needed a way to get him through the ice, out of the water.” Bolting for his truck, Klein grabbed his auger. But when Klein returned, the amphibian’s appendage was protruding happily through one hole, giving a thumbs up sign.

> Then it disappeared momentarily before materializing in another of the house’s holes, holding Schmakel’s and Mechtel’s hooks. “The hand gave us the hooks, another ‘thumbs up’ and disappeared,” Klein said.

> Forty-five minutes later, someone knocked on the fish-house door. It was the scuba diver. He wanted to say hello. Still in his wetsuit. “He said he was sorry but the rope that attached him to the hole where he entered the lake through the ice got caught in our hooks,” Klein said. “He said he and some other guys dive in the lake a couple times each winter, looking for stuff. I guess they were having a contest that day seeing who could find the most anchors.”