Not all fish stories are 'fish stories'

Most people listen to fish stories with a great deal of skepticism, and they rightfully should, as that’s the one time the storyteller is usually expected to exaggerate details.
While in reality I’ve never caught a record-breaker, many of my catches may have seemed that way when I told others about them. The 24-inch bass I caught in 1999 may have immediately gained three or four inches, or so, from its actual length, which I will never reveal; a fish I caught on the Fox River near Eureka was so big I couldn’t land it (technically, it was a sturgeon and landing it would have been illegal – it’s a detail I leave out when explaining the fight it put up); and the first northern I ever caught ice fishing was too big to get through the hole.
The too-big-for-the-hole northern story was one my wife’s cousin, Ryan, tried to use this last weekend when he tried to explain his reasoning for not landing the fish his sister had told us he caught. We more experienced fishermen have already used this excuse before, so hearing it from him just made us laugh. Welcome to Fish Stories 101 we told him.
Being put in your place by other fishermen is something I’ve experienced many times, including once when my fish story wasn’t even exaggerated.
In 1989, when I was 15 years old and living on the Fox River in Berlin, I learned the art of fishing for catfish. It’s simple: put a large weight on your line, leave about a foot and half of line between the hook and weight, put a stink bait on the hook, and cast downriver about 25 feet. During the early evening hours, the catfish patrolling the bottom of the river can’t resist your bait, and anyone with half an ability to hook a fish should be able to land a dozen fish within an hour.
One day, the fishing gods smiled at me and I filled nearly an entire garbage can with catfish. When my dad came home from work, I proudly showed him my haul, expecting him to clean the fish for me, as I wasn’t going to eat them.
Nope, he wanted me to clean them, and after a quick lesson, I did so. I also helped eat them, as I did not want my hard work to go to waste.
When I told my friends about my luck, nobody believed me. “A garbage can? Yeah, right?” my friend Tim told me. My own father, sensing an opportunity to embarrass me, denied my story, saying it was just a small bucket.
Seeing my father was the only witness to my monumental achievement and he wasn’t going to let me brag about it, I’ve pretty much kept it to myself since then. Even as I write this, I expect most readers won’t believe me. After all, it is a “fish story.”
But, when a person talks about someone else’s catch, especially someone they don’t really know, then the fish story can gain credibility and can transcend being just a “fish story.”
During the Christmas weekend, at my father-in-law’s lake (which he doesn’t really own but by making it his lake, somehow the story I’m about to tell kind of becomes my story, and I love talking about me, as regular readers of this column surely know), a group of fishermen from Neshkoro were ice fishing across the lake. When one of their tip-ups popped up, we watched with binoculars to see what they had caught.
Binoculars weren’t needed, though, as the 41-inch northern they pulled through the ice was large enough to see without enhanced vision. We watched in awe as the men gawked at the monster.
Later, my father-in-law, my 4-year-old son, Braden, and I walked across the lake to get a better view. It was 11 a.m., but the guys already had a warm buzz from both the giant fish and the beer they were drinking. Without a doubt, when I looked at it, it was the biggest northern I had ever seen that was still alive and not at a zoo. My father-in-law and I both let them know several times it was a big fish.
We even took pictures of one of the guys holding the fish with Braden, at 46 inches in height, standing next to it.
When we returned to the house, the women there asked if it was as big as it looked from there. “It was a big fish,” we told them.
Braden, repeating what we had said when we were admiring the fish on site, innocently corrected us. “No, it was a damn big fish,” he said.
All of us stopped and looked at him. Even at 4, he knew the correct way of telling a fish story.
I’m sure the “damn big fish” will get a lot bigger when the successful fishers tell others about it, making it a “fish story.” But for now, from our mouths, it’s just a fish story.