I just want to say this up front: I don’t know if coelacanth is singular, plural, or both. For the sake of this post I’m going to assume that the obscurity of this fish is going to hide my ignorance.

Imagine catching a brook trout in an urban waterway in New York City. That would be impressive. You’d probably be shocked; maybe even think that someone played a trick on you. However, in the grand scheme of things it isn’t like char have been extirpated from Manhattan for that long. Less than four centuries ago there were big, hungry brookies swimming where skyscrapers and Starbucks abound today.

Now imagine catching something that has been thought to be gone for thousands of years. Not just gone from a stream, a region, or a continent. Extinct from the whole world. And not just for thousands of years, but for much longer.

Do that, and you might have a little bit of a notion as to how Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer felt when she found herself looking at a freshly harvested coelacanth. You know, the fish that is related to lungfishes and tetrapods. More significantly, the fish that the scientific establishment heartily believed had been extinct since the Cretaceous. You know, supposedly 66 million years ago.

I wonder if anyone lost their job or had some accolades posthumously removed after that little blunder. “By ‘extinct for 66 million years,’ what I really meant was ‘I didn’t look off the coast of South Africa… or Indonesia.’ My bad. At least I wasn’t the guy who thought that gorillas were a myth!”

The coelacanth was quite the surprise. What this little lobed-finned curiosity reminds us of is that there are still surprises out there. Anglers and ocean trawlers alike have yet to plumb the literal and proverbial depths of this world’s waters. That is part of the fun. We usually catch what we expect to catch. But every once in a while, we catch something that we didn’t have any plans of hooking into.

Fish show up where they shouldn’t be. A trout in a warm river. An aquarium species in a suburban pond. A flats fish that found its way all the way up the east coast. Those kinds of catches aren’t necessarily a native brook trout in central park. Such examples aren’t anything like a fish thought to be extinct for epochs. But when you do have a surprise catch, it is something exciting that adds an interesting twist to the experience.

By the way, I’m not advocating you try to fly fish for actual coelacanth. If what the internet tells me is true, they live pretty deep. Like, deeper than any sink-tip fly line deep. Plus, they’re endangered. On top of that, their meat has “high amounts of oil, urea, wax esters, and other compounds that are difficult to digest and can cause diarrhea.” So there you go.

Don’t go chasing coelacanth, just stick to the brook trout and smallmouth you’re used to.