Tidelines – May 21, 2015
There’s a lot in the daily news to get anyone down in the mouth, but just this past weekend a small group of surf anglers and a local Emerald Isle lady rekindled my notions of community, especially when applied to our local fishing community.
Fisherman’s Post was in Emerald Isle at The Reel Outdoors hosting our inaugural Crystal Coast Surf Fishing Challenge. The turnout was low by Fisherman’s Post standards, attracting 35 anglers to fish the ocean shoreline anywhere from Bogue Inlet to Beaufort Inlet, so we struggled a little bit to have a positive outlook. Hosting and staging tournaments is a huge undertaking, and it can be a little trying to offer up that much time and effort for low numbers of participants.
Generating a positive outlook, though, was no struggle for our 35 participants. They showed up on Friday at Registration and seemed to care very little about low numbers. They were on the island to fish all weekend, and winning big money in the tournament was apparently low on the priority list as they drove off excited to find their real estate for the weekend.
And their good mood continued right on into Sunday when we met up again at the Awards Ceremony. Many had had a slow weekend of fishing, producing only some pigfish and small croakers, but all showed up Sunday ready to eat pizza under the EZ Up tents and see which of them ended up on the leaderboard.
As we shared food and drink together, many of our weekend anglers urged us not to give up on the event and then started brainstorming how to improve on the event: how to improve beach access, how to improve parking (especially overnight parking), how to better promote, etc.
Whether we at Fisherman’s Post decide to do the Crystal Coast Surf Fishing Challenge again this fall or wait until next spring, our anglers were easily persuasive enough to get us, too, on board with thinking about changes that can be made to improve the event (rather than thinking about whether or not we should even try again).
And it wasn’t just our anglers that gave us promise. Over the weekend the towns of Emerald Isle, Salter Path, and Atlantic Beach all reached out to Fisherman’s Post and expressed interest in helping us grow our event. All of the towns, like our anglers, want to see this event succeed, and that is endearing in a world where too often the bureaucracy of government thwarts such efforts.
Then there is the local Emerald Isle lady that I mentioned in my introduction.
On Sunday morning we were in a bind. We desperately needed a place to stage the polygraph tests that we do for every one of our surf fishing events. There was no space in the busy and crowded Reel Outdoors parking lot for our traditional trailer (provided by Cape Fear RV & Marine—yes a gratuitous plug here), and there was no spare room for us inside the Reel Outdoors building.
Then I saw a lady across the street from Reel Outdoors doing a little yard work. She had a fishing boat in her front yard and fishing-themed signs hanging from the deck of her beach house. I think my opening line to her was, “I’m going to ask you a question that I’m guessing no one has ever asked you before.”
Of course her initial reaction was to look at me with skepticism out of the corner of her eye, but she allowed me to interrupt her work to explain to her about Fisherman’s Post, the Crystal Coast Surf Fishing Challenge, and the need for space to conduct polygraph tests.
The lady’s name is Sarah, and even though she and her husband would be leaving in about an hour to celebrate his birthday, Sarah agreed to let us set up in her tiki bar on the side of the house. Sarah and her husband used to own Fishin Fever in Salter Path, and I would just like to thank her and her husband again for being so accommodating.
Finally, I’m not sure if the people who pick up Fisherman’s Post Newspaper go right to the photos and skip over my Tidelines article or not, but I am going to try and make an announcement in my column about a pretty big change that we are getting ready to implement.
Starting this year, we will no longer be printing weekly during the summer months (for us, that has been Memorial Day through Labor Day). However, we will continue to update our website on a weekly basis this summer with current fishing reports, tournament coverage articles, and other material that you’ve come to expect from us here at Fisherman’s Post.
Stay tuned for other developments.
