Finger missing for three months swims back home to owner... in the belly of a fish

A fisherman roots around inside the mouth of a freshly caught trout (Getty Images)

A wakeboarder was left bewildered after an angler found his severed finger in the belly of a fish he’d caught, more than three months after the original accident occurred.

Nolan Calvin was cleaning the trout which he landed at Idaho's Priest Lake and discovered the half-digested digit on September 11.

Calvin put the fish in an ice bucket and called the Bonner County sheriff’s office to report his catch's odd taste in fish food.

Local detectives were able to analyse the fingerprint and trace it to Haans Galassi, 31, from Colbert, Washington, who lost four of his fingers in a wakeboarding accident, just 8 miles from where the fish was caught, on June 21.

"The sheriff called me and told me he had a strange story to tell me," Galassi said. "He said that a fisherman was out on Priest Lake and I pretty much knew exactly what he was going to say at that point.

Galassi claimed he mockingly predicted what the sheriff would say to him. He said: “I was like, 'Let me guess, they found my fingers in a fish'."

The wakeboarder told the Spokesman-Review that he had been on a camping trip to the lake when the accident happened and his fingers got caught in loop in the towline.

Galassi also told the paper that she sheriff offered to return his newly-found limb, but replied: “I'm like, 'Uhhh, I'm good'”.