Bucks Mill was an old flour mill just south of Lake Melissa. Dad occasionally used to take me and Michael over there to fish. The best spot was over by the far wall in this picture, but downstream a bit. I caught my first and only dogfish there. It was big and looked absolutely weird to me.
 |
| Minnesota dogfish or bowfin |
I was so scared when I saw it, another fisherman nearby cut my line and released the fish. Michael laughed, but I was just glad to see it gone!
Over by the mill house (and I may have been standing here when I took the photo of the water rushing over the dam) was the foundation of two extra rooms attached to the main mill building. The upper structures had long ago rotted and fallen into the river. There was water in this foundation, and there was a HUGE bullhead swimming in there. Apparently it couldn't get back into the main flow of the river--too fat? or maybe too lazy. You couldn't get it to strike at any kind of bait even if you dangled it right in front of its nose.
2 comments:
The big one that got away :-))
That is a wonderful fishing story. I never heard of a dogfish before -- it does look scary! My dad used to take me and my brother fishing near a power plant dam on the Susquehanna, where we caught bass. As for catfish, my mother told me when she lived in NC that there were huge catfish living at the base of a dam near her and that divers inspecting the dam saw them and refused to go back into the water.
They tell that same story about the divers and the huge sturgeons in the Missouri River by the Garrison dam in ND. I don't know why I'm such a scaredy cat about this stuff. Maybe I should go have a past-life regression done. :0)
m.e.
Post a Comment