While we were trolling for springs on West Coast Haida Gwaii, a boat 100' ahead hooked a big fish that ran right at us, and when I cranked the wheel too hard to port to get out of his way, I sucked a lot of our mono into the prop. I had the hip waders aboard that I wear when launching from the ramp, so while I put them on, my buddy used the kicker to motor up toward a just-submerged rock in the flat-calm water along The Wall.
As we got close, he turned sharply to edge up to the rock, and sucked some more of the trailing monofilament into the kicker, leaving us powerless as we drifted up toward the rock. I quickly unhooked one of the oars reserved for recovering from stupidity or disaster, and got us to where I could step onto the fortunately-barnacle-covered rock. While he held the boat relatively steady using the oar and an anchored piece of bull-kelp, I did surgery on the tangles, then recovered the terminal gear.
Unfortunately, the other boats on the scene were mostly manned by very familiar locals, most of them well known for their crude senses of humor and total lack of sympathy. There were lots of remarks about us being lucky to only have two motors, the weakness of my seal-stalking technique, etc. Fortunately, when we got back on the tack, the bite was still on, and in only a few short years, the incident was mostly forgotten.
