Elkrun

I feel your pain …I know exactly how you felt!


Like I said earlier, I have had a couple of hooks stuck in me! The second and worse time was 2 ½ years ago when I was out fishing for late winter steelhead on one of our smaller local rivers. I was teaching a lady friend who owned the property that we were fishing on how to use a bobber and jig. You have never heard anyone yell as loud as her when she hooks a fish! She really gets excited to say the least.

I always let her make the first cast in my favorite stretch of water because the first jig that goes through it, almost always gets the first fish. She made the first cast and then I made mind about 5 seconds later. Sure enough, her bobber went down, and…fish on!

The spot we were fishing has high banks and you need a long handled net to get to your fish. She was screaming so loud that I was concerned that some near by neighbors would think that she was being rapped or being attacked! If you have ever been around this lady when she catches a fish, you would not doubt what I am saying. She won't stop yelling until that fish is either on the bank or it comes off, so I was in a hurry to get that sucker in so that she would stop that blasted yelling. As I pulled my bobber and jig in, and was reaching for my long handled net, my jig (# 2 Oshaughness- 630M) naturally had to wrap around a small lime off an alder tree.

The noise of her screaming was getting to the point of being embarrassing, so I just grabbed the limb and line with my remaining left hand and gave a hard fast jerk, bending downward hoping that the limb was going to just break off. Well you how that one works... it didn't break! The next thing I knew, there was an extruding pain coming from my thumb!

That #2 jig hook had warped around the top of my thumb, and when I jerked on that limb, I drove that hook right into the center of the "knuckle" of my thumb! It went all the way into the straight part of the shank! When that happen I let a couple prime four letter words, and the lady friend heard me and turned around to see what had happen. She went crazy when she saw my thumb, and started screaming "oh god, oh god, what should I do, what should I do". I told her to just land the fish and I would worry about getting the hook out later. I broke off the line and netter her fish and then had to listen to her crying how awful it looked, and she wanted to take me to the hospital and get the hook out.

That wasn't going to happen for two good reasons; 1) my insurance was a $1000 deductible , so that meant that I was going to have to fork out about $200 bucks or more; and 2) I wasn't going to waste the best part of a half day in the doctor's office when fishing was so great! So I knew what I had to do!

I have pulled a lot of hooks out of the "flesh" before, but pulling a barb hook out of "bone cartilage" is a whole other story (just ask elkrun)! The hook was not coming back out the same hole that it went in, so that meant that I was going to have to push it all the way through the Knuckle cartilage and bring it back up through the top of the thumb. The hook would not go any deeper becuase the point was up against the bone! I had never put myself through so much pain in my life before! As hard as I could pull and push with my small pair of needle noses, the hook would not turn upward. Apparently the point was up against the knuckle bone and it would not turn upward. It took me about 5 minutes before I finally seen the point of my hook pope up through the top of my thumb. I was just about ready to pass out from pain when that hook finally broke through the top of my thumb. The rest was a cake walk once the barb had came though, and all it took then was to cut the hook off behind the barb and pull it back out.

Lesion one; never ever sink a hook into a finger joint because it ain't going to come out very easy!

Lesion two; If I were to do it over, go get a shot of "novicain" and spend the $200!

Lesion three; think real hard about the pro and cons of using a babless hook

Cowlitzfisherman