Fishermen often tell stories of the one that got away and there’s always the tale about the one that was “this big!”

But Carl Reeves, a corrections officer at the Clinton County Jail, may have the best cat-fish story yet.

Tuesday was his day off, so he and his neighbor, Rich Heyward, decided to spend the day fishing on Caesar Creek Lake. They never imagined they would be catching cats in the middle of the lake.

They started early at 7 a.m., enjoying the sunshine and running the boat 30 to 40 miles an hour along the lake. Later in the afternoon, after catching about 30 crappie, saugeye and perch, they decided to slow it down a bit. Around 1:30 p.m., the lake was silent. As they relaxed, something caught Reeves’ ear. It sounded like … a crying baby?

Heyward didn’t hear anything at first, but Reeves was convinced he heard it. The two men started looking all around, searching the entire boat.

“I tapped on the top of my boat, right by my lightwell and I heard this crying,” he said Wednesday.

Getting closer to the sound, Reeves decided to open up the access panel to some electrical equipment. He didn’t expect what stared back at him. Four sets of barely opened eyes belonging to tiny kittens who hadn’t seen their mother or eaten all day. Jumbled over each other, they were a furry mass: two yellow, one calico and one gray.

Reeves was baffled as to why there were cats on his boat and didn’t know how they would have gotten in the closed space, which was only about the size of two shoeboxes.

The men’s next thought was about their mother and whether she was about to claw their eyes out. Reeves said, “I was hoping mommy wasn’t on the boat with us because we would have found that out real quick. What are you going to do? You can’t jump in the water. We were just going to have to fight her off or whatever.”

She didn’t appear, so they finished fishing and went home with the stowaways tucked in their corner. Reeves left the panel open and left a can of cat food on the chance the mother would come to reclaim her young. He pulled the tarp back over the boat and hoped for the best. He said he would not want to have to bottle feed them and he would rather the mother have them than an animal shelter.

But Mother Nature has a way of taking care of her own. When Reeves got up Wednesday morning for work, the can was empty and the kittens were gone.

When he got home from work, he decided to unravel the mystery of how the cats got onboard. Reeves explored with a flashlight and found a hole where a speaker is supposed to be. He recently installed a radio and hasn’t gotten the speakers yet.

He closed up the hole and looked around to make sure they hadn’t been moved elsewhere on the boat.

“I looked everywhere possible on that boat and I haven’t seen them, so apparently she’s moved them,” he said.

Reeves has enjoyed retelling his story. He said the reaction is often one of “How in the world did you get cats on your boat?”

“It was really kinda freaky at one point,” he said. “It was just strange. I’ve found a lot of things in a boat, like a snake, but I’ve never seen kittens in a boat. We did pretty good. That was the catch of the day.”

It was Reeves’ boat’s first trip of the year. It hadn’t been out since last November. He said he’s had a bit of trouble with it and just got it running again.

Last week, the two men went out on Heyward’s boat but figured they would try their luck with Reeves’ boat. It ran fine, but gave them more than they bargained for: a whale of a cat-fish story.