Aliens on light tackle!

So there we are, Big Fred and me, guiding a saltwater fishing expedition in Northern California when Big Boy gets the bright idea to hook up a chunk of bait on a light spinning outfit…”just for kicks.”

It doesn’t take long for the bait to get eaten…by an alien.

And let me tell you, when hooked on light gear, the extraterrestrial beast put up quite a scrap! Ron Milam, of Rocklin, CA was the man on the stick for the battle, which raged on for a good 36 straight hours. Well, okay, maybe it was more like 20 minutes, but it took a good week for Ron’s fingers to uncramp and straighten out after the encounter.

We winced more than once throughout the fight as the rod creaked and groaned under the pressure of the beast, but, amazingly, it held. The massive creature got down to the last few wraps on the spool several times , but Ron was able to carefully work it back towards the boat each time.

Overall, the alien encounter was like trying to land a Wave Runner with a 4-weight, but Ron hung tough and kept up the good fight. We all got a bit nervous as the bizarre leviathan finally surfaced. Ron kept the pressure on the line and eventually brought it boatside. Hmmmm, now what do we do?

Well, we didn’t want to kill the thing, so gaffing it was out of the question and nobody had the cajones to grab it so, I opted to net the thing with my salmon net. Bad move!

Not only did the space monster weigh close to 150 pounds, it also was coated in a noxious brown slime that, to this day, I can’t get off by boat. We unhooked the thing, took a couple pictures and sent it on its merry way.

That night, two black Suburbans with tinted windows tailed us all the way home…

Epilogue
Of course, what we caught was a big bat ray, a species common in the bays of the West Coast. We catch them all the time fishing for sharks and they put up a thumb-burning, rod-testing battle even on heavy saltwater gear. Though there’s a rumor that you can make “poor man’s scallops” from the wing meat of a bat ray (totally false, by the way), they have no food value.