Well, hopefully that never happens!
Quick story... I was fishing at a private bass lake in Texas some years ago with a family friend who had a membership out there. I was fishing eight pound line, thinking I was cool, and really catching some bass. The guy I was with was catching a few, but I was getting a ton of them. Lots in the three to five pound class.
Then I hooked something better. It bit out on the end of a gently sloping point, and started slowly and inexorably swimming towards a laydown about thirty yards away. I was shouting "Do Something! Do something!" like a complete idiot at the guy driving the boat. I knew the outcome if that fish made it to the tree.
Long story short, I made a last-ditch effort to turn the fish. I clamped down on the spool and leaned to the side, trying to get the fish to change direction.
Do you remember the first time you were up close to a really big animal, the sense of how insanely, impossibly big the head on, say, a buffalo is? Well, I guess the change in pressure on my line was enough to get the fish to come up, because a bass came to the surface and tried to jump. It just sort of wallowed there, shaking it's massive head back and forth, looking like all the ancient ages of the forgotten dawn of man come back to terrorize me, wrapped in the flesh of a primordial fish. Way, WAY bigger than a ten pounder. Better than three quarters of the way to twenty would be my guess. I can't say exactly, because that was the only look I ever got at the thing. It sounded, pushing a surge of water in front of it like a beaver, and swam right into that tree. I could feel it moving around for a minute, then it was gone. I laid down in the bottom of the boat and just sort of... checked out. I don't remember anything about the rest of the day, I don't remember getting back to the dock or the drive back to town. I do remember the thought that I was never, ever going to make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight again, though. I wouldn't even touch a spinning rod for ten years after that incident.
SS