Strangest injury caused by a fish

[rororo64]

had a pike tear up my hand pretty bad trying to unhook a lure... was like needles on sandpaper...

 

[wintermute]

When I was about 12 we were bluefishing with my father. It was a rough day. We were on a Grady White Overnighter 20. We were fishing around Graves Light in Outer Boston Harbor. We got one bluefish and while the old man was putting it into the fish box under the walkaround it somehow thrashed and latched on to his face beneath his eye. My mother pried the jaws apart and cut her index fingers to the bone. We didn't know how bad the damage to his face and eye was until he got to Mass. General. The fish just missed his eye and just hung on to the flesh above his cheekbone. He had a dimpled scar but the fish did not remove any tissue. My mother got stitches and it took a few years for her to regain all of the feeling in her index fingers. Between my parents and the fish there was so much blood on the deck it looked like a massacre.

I hate bluefish. I have a big fear of something like this happening to me or worse, falling into a bluefish feeding frenzy.

Pales in comparison, but I was fishing for flounder early in the season with two buddies. It was cold and I didn't have any gloves. One guy's line got wrapped around my line and the chum pot. I haul up the chum pot. My hook is now dangling in the air. A schoolie striper hits his hook and takes off, yanking the chum pot out of my hands, but it stays suspended above the water. It takes a couple of seconds for me to figure out what was going on here (my hands were pretty numb), as the schoolie's yanking on his line, making the chum pot do a little mid-air dance...which is being held up by my hook which is embedding itself in my index finger. I have one friend trying to cut the line with a knife, while the other is yelling for him not to so he can bring in the bass, all of this on an 11' aluminum boat. Realizing something bad was about to happen to my hand between these two idiots, I hauled the hook out of my hand with my other hand (at least it was just a flounder hook) and kept on fishing.

 

[upnorth]

I used to guide for northern pike (amongst others). I was certainly used to the cuts, gouges and slices these toothy fish can dish out, but one time I was taking a hook out of a big, healthy 42" fish when it wacked me in the thigh with its tail. Not sure if it was the angle or what, but it felt like someone hit me with a small baseball bat! My leg just about folded right there. I managed to finish what I was doing and release it unharmed back into the lake, but I walked funny for the rest of the day

I had a buddy that used to do taxidermy years ago. He had a shelf were they kept all the strange objects from the animals that were hit but survived, such as old shot, bullets, arrowheads from deer. They didn't find a lot in the deer but the jackfish (northern pike) had wierd objects in their gut now and then like a flat stone that was skipped or a shiny beer cap tossed out of a boat etc.