Wakeboarder's Finger Found In Fish

If you accidentally leave something behind on a camping trip, you're pretty certain that it's gone—your sock is now a part of a nest somewhere, your carabiner is a treasured trinket in a den and anything edible has long been gobbled up by whatever lucky-feeling animal stumbled across it first. 

On June 21, on a camping trip to Kalispell Islands in Idaho's Panhandle National Forest, 31-year-old Haans Galassi left something behind (or rather, four somethings) when a wakeboarding session went wrong: His fingers.

And that old camping addage? It held true. Last Tuesday, Galassi got a call from an Idaho sheriff. "I was like: Let me guess—they found my fingers in a fish."

Yep.

On September 11, fisherman Nolan Calvin was cleaning a trout that he had caught on the same lake as Galassi's accident when he found a human finger inside. Putting it on ice, he took it to the sheriff's department, where officials were able to fingerprint the digit and ID it as Galassi's. 

According to Sheriff's Detective Sgt. Gary Johnston, the finger was in pretty good shape. "You fall asleep in your bathtub or hot tub, you come out and your fingers are all puckered up and prune-like. And it wasn't like that," he said to The Spokesman-Review. 

The sheriff, like a true gentleman, offered to return the found-finger to Galassi, who (unsurprisingly) declined. "I'm like, 'uhhh, I'm good,'" he said. Though the agency will keep it for a few weeks—just in case Galassi changes his mind. 

Plus, "There's still three more, too," Johnston said. "It's hard to say where those are going to end up."

Now that's fish food for thought.