Tidelines – April 14, 2016
For Fisherman’s Post, the tournament season has officially begun. Last week we went to print with our first tournament booklet of the year, so the Topsail Spring Surf & Pier Fishing Challenge booklet will be distributed this week with the April 14 issue of our newspaper.
While this returning spring tournament of ours is adding a handful of new features that we hope will improve the overall event and please our anglers, unfortunately the path of the Topsail Spring Surf & Pier Fishing Challenge so far this year has been a bumpy one.
About a month ago we discovered that the original dates for the event (May 6-8) were problematic for many because May 8 is Mother’s Day. Trying to host the event on Mother’s Day weekend would have been impossible for a number of our sponsors, vendors, volunteers, staff, and participants, so we tried to make the best out of a bad situation and moved the event to the new dates of May 20-22.
George Greene, of Hope Mills, NC, with the 9.4 lb. black drum that earned him first place surf black drum and was the largest fish weighed in in the Fisherman’s Post Topsail Surf & Pier Fishing Challenge. The drum struck a shrimp as Greene was fishing a short distance north of Seaview Pier at North Topsail Beach.
Luckily for us, many of the people that help us stage this tournament were able to move seamlessly to the new weekend. The tent/table/chair lady, despite the event being in the middle of the spring wedding season, was able to cover us. Stan, our polygraph guy (yes, we absolutely use a polygraph guy with every surf event to help ensure the integrity of the final results), still had an open window to come to the coast on that Sunday. And East Coast Sports and all three Topsail fishing piers, too, were able to accommodate the date change to May 20-22.
Not nearly as lucky, though, were the people that had already made plans to fish with us on the original, and now defunct, dates in early May. These people had already made travel plans, which for some included booking a house at the beach for that weekend (complete with a non-refundable deposit).
I like to focus on the fact that in over 10 years of hosting numerous events, including both tournaments and fishing schools, we have never made an oversight where we originally scheduled an event for a weekend that ultimately was problematic. However, I also understand that for those who now may not be able to fish the Topsail Spring Surf & Pier Fishing Challenge, one mistake is one too many.
As I said earlier, moving the event to the new dates of May 20-22 was merely trying to make the best of a bad situation (the only other real option was just to cancel the event), but positives as a result of the date change are present. For one, the fishing will be better in late May as opposed to early May, and that means better odds of filling up the leaderboard and giving away more prize money.
We’ve also taken efforts at Fisherman’s Post to find ways to add to the event so that people will be more likely to forgive us for the late date change, and most of these improvements focus on attracting more pier anglers to fish with us.
Topsail Island is unique in that the relatively small stretch of coast, in spite of all the big money developers trying to re-purpose anything oceanfront up and down the coast, still boasts three healthy fishing piers. Our goal since adding a Pier Division to our Topsail surf fishing events (both spring and fall) has been to celebrate and be a part of this strong pier fishing community, so we created a couple of new ways to entice pier anglers to come to Topsail on the weekend of May 20-22.
First, thanks to the efforts of Paul and Team Mack Attack Fishing Club, we are offering a Truth Reels pre-registration drawing. Anyone who registers for the Pier Division by the pre-registration date of May 9 is automatically entered into this drawing where Team Mack Attack will be giving away a Truth SG reel (retail value $250). If you’re a pier angler thinking of fishing this event, then this is a great opportunity (great odds of winning) to win a high end reel. And while this prize is just for pier anglers, hopefully in the fall we will be offering separate pre-registration drawings for both surf and pier anglers.
Our other new idea for 2016 is to offer a Pier Cup prize. The Pier Cup will be awarded to the pier angler and the Topsail fishing pier where the heaviest leaderboard fish was weighed in. The name of the angler, the weight of the fish, and the name of the pier where the fish was caught will be forever engraved on the trophy, and then the winning pier will retain possession of the Pier Cup until the next Topsail Surf & Pier Fishing Challenge when it will have to be defended.
So there’s my tournament update for this issue. With my continuing bad luck in regards to wind and weather plaguing all of my potential fishing dates, I was either going to write about the Topsail event or about how I witnessed Sam win more big item prizes at the Cape Fear CCA banquet than I’ve ever seen anyone win at any fundraiser of any kind.
Hopefully for all of our Inshore Trail anglers, Sam has already used up his entire quota of good luck in 2016.
