It’s beyond comprehension how you would calculate the unlikely odds of this story. But here’s what happened.
After winning the Bassmaster Elite at Lake Champlain Sunday, Brandon Palaniuk was returning phone calls and text messages of congratulations well into Monday when he returned a text message from a phone number he didn’t recognize.
“It was from a guy I met at my first (Bassmaster) Classic in 2011,” Palaniuk said. “I met him with a group of guys and we all went out after that Classic in New Orleans.”
The man wanted to know if Palaniuk had lost a pair of sonar units while competing at Lake Champlain, where strong winds towards the end of the final day made for a rough ride to the weigh-in.
“No, but I know exactly who’s they are,” Palaniuk replied.
The sonar units, a 10-inch Humminbird Solix and 12-inch Hummingbird Helix, had been knocked off Seth Feider’s bow after he speared a wave on the bumpy ride to the weigh-in Sunday.
“I didn’t really stuff the wave,” said Feider, who finished second to Palaniuk by 1 pound, 3 ounces. “When I clipped it, I got spray in my face. And I kept getting spray in my face. I assume my graphs were still hanging by the cables over the side of the boat.”
Then the spray went away, and Feider realized his front graphs were gone. “I figured they were 100 feet down at the bottom of Lake Champlain,” Feider said.
Actually, they eventually washed ashore at Isle La Motte, a big island on the northern end of Lake Champlain. It seems a lot of stuff washes ashore at Isle La Motte, especially after strong winds like there were Sunday. The sonar units were bracketed together, just like they were when they were ripped off Feider’s bow.
“That whole setup weighs about 15 or 20 pounds,” said Palaniuk. “And somehow, I guess they float. I gave the kid who found them a hundred bucks. He had a power cord for the Helix and it still works. The Solix had some water in it.
“The whole story blew me away. The fact that those two sonar units would float ashore, that one of them still worked and that a guy I met at my first Classic in 2011 would be the link to recovering them.”
Feider was equally blown away when Palaniuk called to tell him the story.
“Brandon called and said, ‘You want to hear a crazy story,’” Feider recounted. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’”
After hearing the story, Feider was understandably amazed, saying, “The odds of that happening have to be a million-to-one.”
Feider plans to put the Helix back on his bow, saying, “I want to run it the rest of the year. I want it to be back on my boat.”
Finally, there’s this: Never underestimate the exponential power of the bass fishing network. In this case, it performed a miracle.