First you need to know that what used to be Hamilton Island is now the town of North Bonneville.
This happened in the early 1980s. The town of North Bonneville was moved to Hamilton Island after this fishing trip.
One day my brother, my husband, my daughter and I decided to go sturgeon fishing. Hamilton Island was a good place to go, you could drive to the island and park and cast out into the Columbia River.
The men set their poles, and since it was a slow day, they decided to walk downriver and look for sinkers and flies that might have washed up on the bank. There was no one else there; about 50 feet from us was a fairly large fishing boat, but I never saw anyone on it. They could have been fishing on the other side, facing Oregon.
My daughter was recuperating from major gall bladder surgery and was very weak. She was in her early 40s then.
A short while after they left, my daughter said, “I’ve got a bite.”
I said, “What do we do?”
She said, “Daddy told me what to do.” So she started reeling and, since she was so weak, I held onto the pole and we started going down the bank with her reeling and me yelling at the men. It took us close to an hour to get down to the river. I could never get them to hear me.
I said, “What will we do?” They had taken the gape hook with them. I asked if she still had the fish on, which she had. By then, we were both exhausted and I could see the fish. It was big. So I said, “We’ve come this far, so we’re not losing it now.”
So I walked out into the Columbia and got my hands in its gills and pulled. As I pulled, she reeled and we got it in. We were both exhausted, so we sat down on the bank with the fish, to rest.
The men came in a short while and their eyes nearly popped out. They couldn’t figure how we managed to get a fish that big out with no gape hooks. It was the biggest fish caught that day.
I’ll have to say that was the most stupid thing I ever did in my life. That fish could have bitten an arm or leg off, or I could have drowned. The Lord surely watched over me that day.
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