True Story:
Years ago, while fishing down river from the Anacoco Lake Spillway in Louisiana, a few of my friends and I decided we found a decent spot in the river that was slower moving to bank fish for Bass.
After several hours in the Hot/Humid Summer Sun of casting and retrieving with only a few bites we decided to pack it up and head back up to the car empty handed, before everyone could gather everything up I protested for one more cast, figuring that one more throw will do it.
As I casted out as far as I could, I started to reel all the line in praying for just one fish, just one.
As the lure came near, I could tell I would not be going home with anything but a sunburn, but just as the my lure broke the surface as I was standing on a 10 ft bank I noticed that there was a line on my hook, figuring someone had thrown some line in the water and conscience about trash in the waterways I started to wind up the line to throw it away, this went on for some time, pretty soon I had a large ball of line when suddenly I feel some weight on the line, continuing to gather the line to see what is there a Rod breaks the surface, I was excited since it was "finder keepers" and it was a very nice rod and reel, so I start to wind up all the line I had retrieved back into the open face reel, luckily I only had a couple of knots to undue and eventually the line ran out into the water, thinking that maybe I have a cool lure as well on the other end.
Suddenly the line got taunt, gave it a little tug thinking maybe there is a snag, felt like it freed itself and slacked up a bit, so I resumed reeling in the line, when out of nowhere that pole nearly was yanked out of my hands and back into the water, now I realized what happened, some fisherman had his pole yanked from its holder while bank fishing up river somewhere.
The fight continued for a few more minutes since I did not want to lose the fish, it was the only catch for us all day. I got the fish up to the bank and walked it down to where I could get to it, it ended up being a 14 LB cat.
You could imagine the bragging rights on that one, to this day my friends still talk about it and was rubbing it in good on our way out.
The best part about this story is, that I found the guy that lost the pole, I offered him his pole, but he didn't accept it as he wrote it off already as lost, so I offered him the fish that got away from him instead, Gladly he accepted and fried him up for sure.....
