His Fish Catch Turned Out to Be a Real Handful

You shoulda seen the one that got away: It sounds like a fish story, but Hayden McDowell had a witness.

McDowell, an experienced off-shore fisherman, used his bare hands to catch a rare 6-foot 9-inch longbill spearfish at Sullivans Island, S.C.

The 25-year-old Charleston steamship lines agent says he caught the 34-pound fish about 30 yards off the beach and dragged it ashore by its tail.

“I saw some splashing in the water, and I thought at first it was a shark, but when I finally saw the tail, I knew it wasn’t so I ran into the water to grab it,” he said.

Longbill spearfish usually are found considerably farther off shore, and McDowell’s was the first ever landed in South Carolina by a recreational fisherman--with or without a line, state wildlife officer Charles Moore said.

“It’s extremely rare,” Moore said. “No sport-fish catches have ever been recorded, but it may have been landed by a commercial fisherman using long lines for tuna or marlin.”

McDowell said he plans to have his catch mounted.

Tanks, but no tanks: When John Hausen arrived a week late at high school in Rockford, Minn., no one thought it unusual. He was transferring from overseas, he said, and was eager to be on the football team.

But when school officials did some checking, they found that Hausen was really Jonathon House, a 1984 graduate from nearby Monticello High School who was on leave from the Army.

“I love football and I got a stupid idea in my head one day that I wanted to play again, and I decided on a way to do it,” House said from his Army post at Fort Campbell, Ky. “The story just popped into my head. I’m a salesman at heart.”

House posed as a student from Australia, telling principal Nord Osland that he had been living in Sydney for three years with his father, an American oceanographer working for the Australian government, and that he had attended Dunberry Academy.

“He was a real pleasant, athletic and attractive young man--real popular, and he did well in his classes,” Osland said.

Osland said he became suspicious when House could not produce identification to confirm his eligibility to play football. Osland learned that there is no Dunberry Academy in Sydney, then traced House’s motorcycle license to a Jonathan Troy House of St. Cloud.

“He admitted he had graduated from Monticello in 1984,” Osland said. Wright County authorities had filed fraud charges against House, but those were later dropped when he was returned to the Army.

Thomas Wolfe was right: Homing pigeons have trouble finding their way home if there’s a disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field, which is why pigeon racers call the National Earthquake Information Center in Boulder, Colo., before a big meet.

Solar flares, earthquakes, even the pull of the tides can cause homing pigeons to become disoriented and get lost, sometimes permanently, according to pigeon racer Tom Pope.

That happened in a Sept. 14 race shortly before the devastating earthquake in Mexico.

Pope lost six of eight birds.

He’s leading with his left: A man accused of assaulting another man outside a Tacoma, Wash., bar wants to show jurors a tape of Marvelous Marvin Hagler’s successful defense of his middleweight title against Thomas Hearns as part of his defense.

John Patrick Ray’s lawyer said that watching the April 15 Hagler-Hearns fight on closed-circuit television put the alleged victim into a violent mood.

“Since it is well known that this fight is one of the best of all time, I would like to show it to the jury so that jurors will be able to experience the same mental state and euphoria as the ‘victim’ and thereby hopefully lend support to my defense that the victim was the aggressor,” Ray’s lawyer said.

For the record, Hagler knocked out Hearns in the third round of the fight in Las Vegas.

Quotebook

Dallas Cowboys Coach Tom Landry, when asked to rate his secondary on a scale of 1 to 10: “Do we have to start at 1?”