Alright so me and my friend were out fishing tonight at a small secluded pond near my house in northern california. I've been to this pond probably 10 times and caught many small bass fishing there and had never encountered anything out of the ordinary until tonight..
To access the pond you have to park your car on the side of a busy highway and then walk a few hundred yards down a wide trail. We like to bring a canoe along so we can get to all of the good fishing spots quickly.
Tonight we rolled up to the pond around 7 o'clock and immediately saw something strange in the water. At first it seemed like there was an otter or seal swimming in slow circles on its back, but after a closer look it turned out to be a strange fish swimming on its side with its mouth out of the water. We figured that it would be better to just leave it alone because it was peak fishing time and we didn't want to miss out.
After 2 solid hours of fishing we finally call it a night and head back to shore. By this time it's getting dark and we forgot our flashlights so we don't really want to waste too much time. But as we get near to shore we spot the fish again doing the exact same thing, and now that the fishing is over, our curiosity gets the better of us and we decide to try and catch it. We thought since it was acting strangely that it was probably dying and catching it would be easy. We were wrong. After missing it with our hands and bashing its head with our paddles repeatedly we still couldn't land the fish so we had to get creative. While i got the boat close, my friend got his paddle under the fish and then launched it into the middle of the boat. Then all hell broke loose. The fish flipped out and stared thrashing violently sending tackle and empty arizona cans flying. The act of flinging the fish also brought a ton of water along with it and to make things worse the fish started bleeding profusely. I had to pin it with my foot so that we could get it back to shore before it jumped out of the boat. Finally we get back to shore but the fish is still raging. I managed to kill it with a rock after a few minutes and after we got all the bloody muddy water out of the boat, brought it back to my house for further examination.
At first we thought it was a piranha but it had blunt teeth and that would have been absurd so we Googled "freshwater fish in north america" thinking that we would find a match for sure. After scanning through about 50 images and finding no convincing matches we were confused. From all the pictures we had ever seen of piranha it really looked like we had caught one. So we investigated and it turns out that the fish we caught was an exact match to a vegetarian species of piranha found the the amazon called the Pacu Piranha. I'll let the pictures prove the rest but yeah...
We think that someone had been keeping it in an aquarium but it had grown too large and they had tried to ditch it in the pond. But because it had lived all its life in a tank it was having a hard to acclimating to the new environment and that would explain the way it was acting. I'm gonna call fish and game in the morning and see what they say and hopefully get a legit confirmation that it is indeed a piranha. But i think this is a pretty epic fishing story and i thought since i had nothing better to do with my night i would share it with ns!
oh yeah, pictures.
What we managed to catch
What we found on google images for Pacu Piranha
See the resemblance?
****SPARKNOTES****
Went fishing in a california pond and found a piranha
