Catching fish

I went kayaking yesterday and caught a large fish, which is interesting because I don't fish and didn't have any fishing gear with me.

I paddled south, upstream, passing under Virgina Beach Boulevard, I-264 and Potters Road, seeing the usual collection of herons, red-winged blackbirds, Canada geese, and such, plus a muskrat at the water's edge. There's a small bridge on Arrowfield, and I went under that, following a small stream about as far as the northwest corner of North Adventure Drive. On the way back out to the main stream, there's a small island, and as I was going past that, I saw a yellow-orange triangle, a few inches on a side, rise out of the water. A couple of seconds later it dipped back under and I realized it was a dorsal fin. As I paddled over to take a closer look I saw something dark moving through the water--which is pretty murky--and thought "That's got to be an eel or something, it's too big to be a fish." I got to within a few feet of it, though, and it was a fish; I couldn't see the head or tail but the body was about 9 inches from dorsal to ventral and a bit more than two feet long. I leaned over and poked him with my paddle; he zoomed off about twenty feet and then stopped and turned around--clearly he thought he was big enough that he didn't need to be afraid of anything, I'd just caught him by surprise.