The "The One That Got Away" Story

It was an ordinary day.  In Valley City, North Dakota, the phrase "the one that got away" briefly came to life for one fisherman.  It happened when the walleye he caught flopped out of his hands and down a storm drain while he was posing for a picture with his catch.  Unwilling to give up his catch, angler Shawn Grim used his rod, reel, and lure with three treble hooks to fish the walleye out of the drain.  And it's no fish tale.  That's because Valley City Police Department traffic cameras caught the whole thing on camera.  Grim told "WDAY" that the walleye was a "gorgeous" 22-inch-long fish.  After a day's fishing at his secret spot on a local lake, Grim headed into town and at some point — proud of his catch — decided to pose for a photo with the walleye.  "So I'm holding this fish, getting ready and stuff like that, and all of a sudden it flip flops onto the street. OK. Not a big deal. I go down to grab it. Boom, boom, boom, right into the drain sewer," Grim said. "It's like you've got to be kidding me."  When WDAY showed Grim the traffic cam footage of the fish flop, he reacted by saying "Yeah, that was it. That was the,  'You've gotta be kidding moment right there.'"  Recalling the moments after the fish flopped into the drain, Grim said he could see through the grate and that the fish was flopping around.  He had to think quickly to recover it.  "I go, 'What do you do with this?' I'm going, 'Maybe it's just like a big manhole cover, you know, maybe I can lift this, you know, thing up and, you know,'" Grim said. "Of course I grab it and it's like 'That's going nowhere, that's going nowhere.'"  Trying to come up with a plan to recover the fish, Grim headed to his vehicle.   "I go to my tackle box and I pull out a Rapala, right? Three treble hooks. This thing catches fish. Is it going to catch fish in a storm sewer? We're going to find out, right?" Grim explained, referring to a fishing lure.   Grim's first attempt to catch the fish for a second time didn't quite do the trick, but it gave him hope.   "I'm sitting here trying to snag and I snag it. I get the fish and it's like, 'Oh,' and that pops out. It's like, 'OK, it's possible,'" Grim said.  The traffic camera footage shows Grim using his fishing rod to try and catch the walleye. Eventually, he succeeded in hooking the fish. In the end, Grimm caught the fish twice, and he got to take a photo with his catch.  "Pull it up, slowly. Grab the fish by the back of the head and slowly pull it out of the deal,"  Grim said, explaining how he proceeded to get the fish out of the drain. "So then we stand up, we take the picture away from the gutter, right?"  The situation has given Grim something more than just the pride of catching a big one. He now has a factual fish story for the ages.  "Even the goofiest things like fish down a drain," he said. "It's like you got that story and it's like sometimes it's even better than the fish he caught, story."  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.