Have You Ever Encountered a Submarine While Fishing?

“Have you ever seen a submarine while fishing in the Gulf of Mexico?”

This was a post I made a couple of weeks ago on social media as rumors of anglers encountering subs and reading strange things on sonar have circulated for years.

The first answer I got shocked me.

“About 40 years ago I was in my boat striper fishing with a buddy by the Toledo Bend Dam and a small sub surfaced out in front of us. Freaked us out! They came over by us….popped the hatch and told us they were checking the dam for cracks,” said Greg Ball.

Here’s a homemade submarine being used on a lake in British Columbia.

Tiny submarines have been used for things like dam inspection and exploring freshwater environments.

In fact, personal submarines are available on the market, although the price tag is out of reach of most of us. These small ones are one or two man craft and are used quite often for underwater tourism in the Caribbean.

There are other kinds of sub encounters out there and they are what I was originally looking for.

Bill Blodgettt, host of Majesty Outdoors, had an interesting submarine encounter.

“Filming an episode of Majesty Outdoors off the coast of St. Simons Island, Ga one rose up less than five miles offshore. The captain made us turn off cameras until it submerged. A nuclear submarine is freaking huge,” he said.

One reader who wishes to remain anonymous shared this which sounds like a sub used for “illegall” activity.

“I heard one story from off the keys in Florida about a guy out fishing who said that something just under the water crossed behind his boat and it looked for all the world like about three big LP gas tanks welded together with two pipes sticking up. One was an exhaust for a small engine (you could hear it) and the other probably an air intake. Like most of them it was barely under the water and likely didn’t have the ability to dive.”

Bret Howard had an interesting reply to my posting.

“Funny you ask this. About 15 years ago, my dad and I were fishing near the between bridge city and vidor very near the Neches. I thought my line got snagged and started to pull to break the line. It slowly came so I thought it was a tree branch. It was what looked like one of these submarine mines. My dad flipped out BIG TIME and made me cut the line and we left and he would never go back there.”

A Russian nuclear submarine entered the Gulf in 2012 and operated for weeks without detection.

You can read about it here.

Have you ever spotted a submarine while fishing? If so, email chestesr@chestermoore.com. We’d love to share these wild stories.

Chester Moore