No one believed me when I told them I’d hooked a snapping turtle while reeling in a palm-sized bluegill. You can’t blame them, since we were in Southern Utah – not exactly a hotspot for either species.
This was a long time ago, during my first attempt to gain higher education. I was attending what was then Dixie State University (it has since been renamed Utah Tech) in St. George, Utah, where my parents had moved after spending most of their lives in the northern part of the state. As a diehard trout angler, I wasn’t stoked on moving to a land of bass lakes, but the promise of a free place to live while going to school was too good to pass up.
As most of us anglers are wont to do, I started exploring town, looking for places I could wet a line quickly between classes. For being smack in the middle of the desert, there’s a surprising amount of ponds in St. George. Most of them are seasonal trout ponds that get stocked during the winter, but a few harbored other fish.
One was a tiny pond – maybe a half acre, at most – full of bluegill and a few larger smallmouth bass. This pond had the advantage of being about 10 minutes from campus, and the fish weren’t nice enough to draw any sort of consistent angling pressure.
While there were plenty of small fish in the pond, some of the bluegill grew to decent sizes, especially given the circumstances. I never could get the smallmouth to cooperate, despite my best efforts. I even took my float tube out on the pond one night after dark, but I bungled the only bumps I got on a Clouser minnow.
One evening after class, I shot up to the pond, looking for a quick distraction before heading home. I caught a few fish right off the bat, and the largest put a decent bend in my 3-weight.
As I released the last fish, that’s when I saw the turtle. It swam near the bottom, claws extended, and took a swipe at a few tiny fish. I’d never seen a snapping turtle in person before, but it wasn’t hard to tell what this critter was. It looked like it got up on the wrong side of bed every morning. I instinctively clenched my fingers as the turtle swam back into the depths.
I hooked another fish a few minutes later. I’d thrown the cast a bit further out, so there was maybe 20 feet of line to retrieve. As I got the fish close to shore, just as I bent down to grab it, the turtle shot out of the depths and hit that bluegill like a freight train.
Not quite believing what I was seeing, I just kept stripping line in, but now my 3-weight was doubled over and in danger of snapping. The turtle thrashed its head side to side, and I heard a distinct crunch as its snout broke the water’s surface. Suddenly, all the tension was released, and my bluegill – still somehow stuck to my fly – flew up onto the bank.
Well, part of it did, at any rate.
The snapper took a chunk of the fish with it.
Armed with pictures, I booked it home to tell my dad – the one responsible for my fishing obsession in the first place – the story. He didn’t believe it until he saw the poor bluegill, bitten in half with shark-like precision.
Utah isn’t home to any native populations of snapping turtles. Apparently, some maniacs keep these things as pets. Once they’ve realized they’re harboring an animal that’s actively plotting their demise, they set them free in places they’ll thrive – like a pond full of bluegill.
I’ve had sharks bite fish off my line in the Florida Keys, and I’ve watched seriously large brown trout follow and hit smaller fish hanging onto my streamer. But none of those were as shocking as watching a snapping turtle just appear out of nowhere, grab onto a bluegill, and hold on while I kept reeling in.
Last week, my wife, daughter and I were back in St. George, visiting my parents. On a whim, I told my dad I wanted to check out the old bluegill pond. Catching sunfish is always a great way to spend time, and it had been too long since the last time I tried for any. We pulled up to the pond, and I half-expected to see the snapping turtle waiting for me.
The turtle was gone, and so were the larger fish. Tiny, young-of-year fish flooded the shallows. On the edges, some larger fish patrolled, but even those were small compared to what I used to catch.
I don’t know if the bigger bluegill are gone; if they are, I bet it’s because the snapping turtle isn’t making regular meals out of them anymore.