Tidelines – April 26, 2012
The pre-dawn trip to the North Topsail Beach boat ramp to meet up with Capt. Daniel Jarvis, of Flat Foot Charters, gave Max Gaspeny and I a chance to touch base on developments in the Fisherman’s Post Inshore Tournament Trail. While our morning target that day would soon be bonito just inshore of Diver’s Rock, the talk in the truck was centered on flounder and red drum, the two divisions in the five events that will comprise our season-long points chase.
Our first of five events is just around the corner, the Wrightsville Beach Inshore Challenge (formerly called the Spring Inshore Challenge), to be held June 1-2 at Wild Wing Cafe (registration, captains’ meetings & party, awards, and awards dinner) and Wrightsville Beach Marina (weigh-in).
The tournament booklet for this event gets distributed in the next week or two, and it’s the push to print of this booklet that finalizes a lot of the ideas and deals we’ve been making with area sponsors. These are the relationships that put more cash and prizes in the pockets of our participants, as well as fuel the festivities.
Many already know of the good time that surrounds our annual Wrightsville Beach spring tournament, but for those that are new, or for whatever reason have just kept from joining in, I’d like to try and entice you with (1) free pizza, soda, water, and Anheuser Busch and Sweetwater Brewery products on Friday, (3) a complimentary dinner buffet provided by Wild Wing Cafe for Saturday’s awards, (4) a low entry fee, (5) numerous spots on the leaderboard for a chance to qualify for lots of cash and prizes, predicted to total over $15,000 this year, and (6) a jump start on qualifying for even more money to be awarded at the culmination of the five events with the Carolina Beach tournament in mid-September.
If I started to thank all the sponsors already on board, then my Tidelines column would be a laundry list and not very engaging. We’ve got many of our perennials already signed up (Tex’s Tackle, SeaTow, and NewBridge Bank), some new additions (Penn and Rod Man Custom Rods), and previous sponsors that have raised their level of involvement (West Marine and Charter Lakes Marine Insurance).
So Max and I pulled into the dirt parking lot by the high rise bridge a little after 6:00 am with high energy stemming from both the Tournament Trail talk as well as the anticipation for surfacing bonito committing to our diamond jigs.
During the quick boat ride up to New River Inlet, Max and I got to touch base with some old charter captain friends—Wayne Crisco of Last Resort Charters was at the boat ramp, also getting ready to chase bonito, and Ricky Kellum of Speckled Specialist Charters was just pulling out of New River Marina, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that he was going trout fishing.
The rest of the morning was spent creating a new friendship with Capt. Daniel Jarvis. He quickly had us on the bonito (maybe three minutes into our scouting troll), shared stories of the origin of his “Flat Foot’ nickname and how he got his fishing start trolling for stripers in the North Carolina mountain lakes, and easily fell in the routine of joking me about having to swim in if I got the call from Leslie that she was headed to the hospital (as of print time, no baby #3).
The three of us not only caught bonito both on the troll and while casting, but we did so while enjoying that the area was surprisingly free of boats (maybe a half dozen others kept us company that morning). We kept enough fish for dinner, and were back in Wilmington early enough for a tuna salad lunch.
You can read all about our trip with Daniel in this issue’s Guide Time feature beginning on page 30. For me, the trip was a homerun, especially since the alternative to not going would have had me at Target shopping for a new baby monitor.
