The fish was swimming across the flooded Petoskey roadway, which had been swamped by a combination of rainfall and late-season snowmelt. Then, someone saw the bubbles, an indication that it was a fish.
And that’s when the 14-year-old jumped out of the vehicle and, by hand, caught an 18-20-inch-long pike. He didn’t even stop to think, he said, about all that water and getting his shoes wet — and stuff.
“I snagged it,” Gavin Bruney said on Monday, April 20, recounting to the Free Press what had happened last week on his way home from school. The experience, he added, was “fun” and “cool” at the same time.
Across northern Michigan and parts of Wisconsin, flooding is so bad that stories have been emerging of fish — big ones, like pike and sturgeon — swimming down roads and in places that they normally wouldn’t be.
Fortunately, for the Petoskey teen, the 15-second moment was caught on a mobile phone video, which is now circulating on the internet, and making the eighth-grader “middle-school” famous.
Otherwise, who would have believed such a fish story?
In the recording, he cradled the pike and exclaimed: “First fish of the season!”
The video also is turning out to be a bit of a bright spot in an otherwise dreary April in which many Michigan homes — potentially hundreds, there’s no definitive count so far — are underwater.
And, in a way — for the teen — it’s a bit of cosmic karma.
Where homes aren’t yet submerged in Petoskey, water is coming up to residents’ front doors. At the Bay View Country Club’s golf course, the greens have turned into huge water hazards.
“It’s definitely odd,” Gavin Bruney’s father, Jeff Bruney, 46, told the Free Press on Monday, of his son’s story. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think that bridge was going to be underwater.”
And when the teen is as old as his dad, the details will get even better.
The moment may have earned the young angler who hopes to fish for a living a bit of street cred. And on social media, it is also garnering lots of thumbs-ups and clever comments.
When UpNorthLive.com — the combined digital and broadcast home of northern Michigan’s WPBN-TV, WTOM-TV, WGTU-TV and WGTQ-TV — posted the short video to social media, within hours, it was viewed nearly a half-million views.
And in Wisconsin, TV stations have video of sturgeon in flooded parking lots and lawns.
Jeff Bruney said he took to fishing after they did it together when the boy was just 3 or 4 years old. Now, he goes fishing just about every day. And after the teen caught the pike, Bruney said, someone told him it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But the older Bruney added, it wasn’t: His son already caught an 8-inch bluegill like that.
As for the flooding, the water level on Crooked Lake, where the family house is located, is up probably about two feet higher than it should be, Bruney said. The only damage so far was to the aluminum boat Gavin uses to fish and his boat hoist, which was destroyed.
Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Petoskey teen grabs a big pike as it swims across road
Reporting by Frank Witsil, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
