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When the bite came, it almost pulled Dahlberg out of the boat, and he nearly went over several times after that. With the rod pointed at the fish, Larry bent his knees, dropped his butt to keep his gravity center as low as possible, and he cranked. He gained 20-feet of line, pulling the boat to the fish, lifting as hard as he could, his back feeling, he says, as though hit with a burning probe.

Then the cat shook its head, took back the line, and towed the boat, stern spinning madly in the current, up stream. To regain control, Larry and his guides started the motor in order to get a new angle on the fish. At the new angle, and if he could pull hard enough, Larry might plane the fish to the surface. Only a few minutes had passed, but they were, said Dahlberg, among the most grueling he had ever experienced in a lifetime battling huge fish.

"I was on the edge," he says. "I was going anaerobic. I was seeing little dots and floaters in my peripheral vision. At the end it felt like my heart was going to explode."

Then, thirty feet distant, the fish surfaced. "It looked like a barnyard beast, or maybe a shark," Dahlberg said.