Not a personal catch, but a true story...

Center Hill Lake in Tennessee and Lake Cumberland in Kentucky are
jeopardized today by ever-enlarging fissures in the limestone rock
formations surrounding the dams. Water rushing through the fissures and
caverns is dissolving the limestone. As the channels widen, the amount of
water available for hydro-generation decreases, and the foundations of the
dams are weakened.

Years ago, there was a dam across the Tennessee river below Chattanooga, not
too far above where Nickajack Dam is now. Hales Bar Dam was owned by the
Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO). It, too, was built on limestone
bedrock. Apparently, small fissures connecting the water above and below the
dam, undetected at the time of construction, grew in the course of 20 to 30
years. In several places along the dam, such leakage flows produced visible
"boils" on the surface. Those boils were an excellent place to catch Sauger
(known in Tennessee back then as "jacks.")

TEPCO tried to plug the leaks by dumping barge loads of rocks and gravel on
the spots above the dam where some of the inlets of the fissures were
detectable, but that was ineffectual.

Undaunted, TEPCO assigned their best minds to solve the problem once and for
all. Sure enough, they came up with a novel solution.

Due to changes in ladies clothing styles in the late 1930's, merchandisers
found themselves with large stocks of lace-up corsets that they couldn't
sell. TEPCO got a boxcar load and put them on a barge at Chattanooga, along
with many coils of barbed wire. Positioning the barge above the holes
upstream of the dam, they cut the bindings on the coils of wire and dumped
them into the holes. Then they started throwing in corsets, weighted down
with rocks.

Brilliant! How could that approach not work!

Well, nature found a way. Corsets were pulled into the holes by the
currents, but the leaks were not significantly reduced. Large numbers of the
them swept through the holes, emerged in the boils, and drifted off
downstream. trotline fishermen for miles down the river found their hooks
loaded with corsets over the next few weeks.

For more like this, see http://haubenreich.net/halesbar.htm

Joe
______________________


"Colin" wrote in message
oups.com...
What are the weirdest (whatever your definition of that is) things that you,
or any friends, have caught so far while fishing ?