OSU student catches big squid

"It was a monster. It was pretty scary coming up at first," said Oregon State University senior Brandon Brown about the 5-foot squid he had caught off Oregon's coast. He had pulled the squid up from a depth of 600 feet.

Brown's catch even shocked Lars Robison, the captain of the charter boat Samson out of Dockside Charters in Depoe Bay.
"That's the weirdest thing I've ever seen caught," he said.

"I thought I caught like a 30-pound lingcod," Brown said. "It took me about 20 minutes to get it up. It was definitely a ride. It was weird, though, because it kept swimming away. Normally when you reel a fish up, it comes straight up."

"When it got up close, I was amazed by what it was," Brown said. "And then they brought it up with the net, and it came out on the boat, and I was kind of stunned."

The huge squid had shot water out of its siphons like a fire hose when it was in the water, Robison said. "And we got him, netted him, put him on the boat, and that thing, you know, just didn't move around," he said. "It was squirting water all over the place until we got it out of the water, and then we put it in the fish box, and it just didn't do anything. He just kind of sat there and looked at us."

Robison asked Brown if he liked to eat squid.

"They had asked me if I eat calamari, and I'd never done it," Brown said. "And actually I think that I'm allergic to shellfish."

No one else wanted the squid, either, so Brown decided to put it back.

"So we picked it up and put him back in the water," Robison recalled. "And it was there for a minute or so, just laying there in the water. And all of a sudden this big blast of ink came out, and he went jetting off into the deep."

Where are Ernest Hemingway and Jules Verne when you need them?

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