Last weekend was the opening of walleye fishing in Minnesota, and there are many ways to catch a fish. A Twin Cities woman did it in a special - and terrifying way over the weekend. And she wasn't even on a lake.
How Beth Borgen Lindburgh came into possession of a particular walleye is quite a fish tale.
"So, my wife and the dog and I were just heading up to the Crosby-Aitken area for a nice relaxing weekend," Lindburgh told the WCCO Morning News. "So we're heading up Highway 169 along the west side of Mille Lacs Lake, and we're just huge eagle advocates. So as we come across where the Rum River exits Mille Lacs Lake, there's always eagles up in the trees. So we're excited to see the eagles."
What happened next?
"Anne looks up and she says, 'oh, there's an eagle in the - oh my gosh, it just dropped her fish on us, "explains Lingburgh.
This was no little fish either. And the bald eagle dropped an 18-inch walleye from the top of the pine trees.
"I mean, it shattered the windshield on our truck," Lindburgh, who happens to be a driver's education instructor, described.
She didn't stop right away, with Highway 169 being one-lane in each direction in the area despite the heavyweight walleye knocking the windshield in towards the two nearly four-inches according to Lindburgh.
"But fortunately, my side, the driver's side, I just had the little fingerlings so I could actually see what I was doing," Lindburgh ssaid. "So I could see that I was driving. So I just put on my hazard lights and kept driving until I sort of got my wits about me. But there's not a lot of great places even to pull over on 169."
They ended up pulling into Grand Casino Mille Lacs, just up the highway from where the fish hit their truck.
"The car that was behind us pulled up alongside, this lovely older couple, and both of them look and smile at us and give us this big thumbs up, you know, like you guys OK? And then the gentleman had his window down, so I roll my window down and he said, 'the walleye is in the back of your pickup truck," Lindburgh said.
Quite a catch. But Lindburgh says they know they were fortunate not to have been seriously hurt.
"I mean, I kid you not, we were covered in glass," she says. "Covered in glass, because this shattered this windshield. And truly, before we could even move, we had to vacuum ourselves off. I mean, there were shards - shards of glass everywhere."
Lindburgh says they did call the state patrol to report the incident. As for the fish and what they did with it? It happened Friday - a day before the opener - so keeping a walleye isn't technically legal. She also believes with the size of the fish, the bald eagle likely picked it up while it was already dead and it was likely just too large for the eagle to handle.
"So we ended up disposing of the fish in a manner per what the DNR had told us," Lindburgh said.
Not that it was caught in the way the DNR prefers. All it cost them was a windshield and a lot of stress.