Little sister, Big fish

So my little sister is seven years younger than me. We love hunting and fishing together. It seems every time we do one of these things together the story that is told in the future makes my sister come out on top, some true, some embellished a bit.

Here are a few examples.

We were bottom fishing somewhere in British Columbia, I was 19 and my sister was 12. We were pulling in bottom fish left and right. Anyone who bottom fishes the ocean knows that snagging your hook can be a common event. My sister said she had a fish on her line. (You should know we were using ultra light poles with 10 lb test.) All of a sudden her line went tight, like the fish wrapped the line around a log. When my sister pulled the line to either break the line or break it loose from being snagged, the line was slowly and surely coming up, as if the log was coming up with the line. Eventually we could see through water and to all of our surprise there was a huge fish. A 4.5 foot 75 lb lingcod. The weird thing was it wasn't even fighting. I got the net ready and when it came to the surface I netted it. The fish did not enjoy this part, and almost pulled me overboard. With help from Dad we got the fish aboard the boat. Again to our surprise the lingcod spit out a rock fish that was attached to my sister's hook. So she hooked a small fish, the big fish ate the small fish, and would not let it go. Now for the past eight years Dad tells the story of my sister catching the biggest fish of our six week trip.

A few years later my sister came over to visit me from Western Washington to where I live in Eastern Washington. It was summer so we went fishing in a local lake. We had been fishing for a few hours, I had caught around 6 or 7 trout while my sister had not caught any. I noticed that my electric motor was starting to run out of juice so I figured we should head back to the truck. On the way my sister hooked into the biggest trout I have ever seen in this lake. (This lake is known for quantity not quality of fish.) Since we had previously kept only one of my fish to cook for dinner, we kept hers as well. Since I had the camera I took the photo, when she asked for a copy of the pic through email I sent her the picture and it might have had some editing.

Again my little sister came to Eastern Washington to do some hunting. We were in a good spot for ducks and quail. We were walking a ditch and a single quail got up out of the thick brush, my sister shot and it came down. If you ask my dad about his account of the event he would say, she raised her gun, shot and killed the quail before I had any idea what was going on. My story from what I remember is, I was 70 yards away and my little sister shot from the hip with her eyes closed and got lucky.

I realize the story is about quail and there is a duck in the
picture being held by our dad off camera.

Currently my sister moved to Hawaii for college and I haven't got to do much of anything with her for the past two years. I miss being in the outdoors with my little sister and can only hope one day she will return to live in Washington again and hunt and fish with my wife, daughter and I.