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Fishing Buddies Shocked To Reel In A Duck

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Last month, Nicholas Colangelo and fishing buddy Luke Wholey reeled in a monster Muskie in northwest Pennsylvania.

"We caught the biggest fish that I've ever seen in my life," Colangelo says. "It was 53 inches. We let it go, so I didn't get any weight on it, but it was about 45 to 50 pounds."

On weekdays, he puts aside his fishing pole and camera, and trades if for a spatula, in the kitchen of Colangelo's, in the Strip District.

But even the master of the grill could never cook up a fish story like the surprise they encountered up north, by the Allegheny River.

"One of our flags goes off," he says. "I run over to it. And my friend runs over to it. And I decided to film him. And so I'm walking behind him with my camera. And he's doing the very typical thing that we do while we're out there. And all of a sudden he pulls up this duck. Merganser is what it is. A red-breasted merganser. He pulls it out of the hole. I couldn't believe what I saw. Honestly."

They set about releasing the bird, which had been doing some fishing of its own under the ice.

Meanwhile, the ice duck video has hooked hundreds of thousands of viewers on social media.

"We never really made the news aside from the big fish a couple weeks ago," Colangelo concludes. "And then I catch a duck."

Once the hook was removed, the water fowl decided it was time to duck out. He returned to the flock.

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