Tidelines – July 26, 2012
How do you shove an unwilling 300+ lb. man off a dock into the water? I’ll tell you what I did. I stood behind a man in a wheelchair.
Last week our sales manager, Joshua Alexander, released his first billfish, a sailfish hooked near 23 Mile Rock. Joshua was on a boat with Max Gaspeny (our Editor), Bob Newell (of the Cape Fear Sailfish Classic), and Capt. Bobby Bailey doing a Guide Time trip to produce an article (that article appears in this issue on page 30).
The crew wanted to “creek” Joshua when they got back to Wrightsville Beach Marina, and they felt comfortable that they had enough manpower to accomplish the feat. It wouldn’t have needed to come to force anyway, as Joshua was excited about his billfish and would have gone in willingly. However, once on the docks the crew decided against it.
Joshua Alexander is a large man, and the three of them just weren’t quite sure how (if?) they would get Joshua back out of the water.
Fast forward almost a week later and the Fisherman’s Post crew is at Town Creek Marina hosting the inaugural Morehead City Inshore Challenge (that article is on page 32). In our minds, Joshua was still owed a “creek,” but now that a week had passed we weren’t sure whether or not Joshua was still of that same mindset.
The Fisherman’s Post staff doesn’t have any future in used car sales. We are horrible liars. Someone early on Friday thought that a good way to entice Joshua to get near the water would be to say they saw a sea turtle and that Joshua should come down to the floating dock to see the turtle.
Joshua didn’t bite on the sea turtle story, so the Fisherman’s Post staff (in their own brand of logic) somehow thought that if they just repeated “sea turtle” enough times, then eventually Joshua would walk down to the dock. And, unsurprisingly, that repetition didn’t work.
We were approaching the end of weigh-in on Saturday and hadn’t made any progress on getting Joshua into position to push him into the water. Even if we had gotten him down to the docks to see the “sea turtle,” we still had to figure out how to get his phone from him before giving him the shove. Clearly we needed a new plan, and that opportunity arose when we got a visit from Tred Barta, the legendary fisherman, hunter, and outdoorsman, who had been across town hosting his annual Barta Boys and Girls Club Billfish Tournament.
We pulled Tred aside and told him our Joshua tale, and he quickly instructed us to have Joshua meet him down on the docks as he was being loaded on his boat to head back over to the Beaufort town docks.
This time instead of “sea turtle,” I told Joshua that he and I, as representatives of Fisherman’s Post, needed to go down to thank Tred for stopping by our tournament. Joshua stood up, passed his phone to Max, and headed down to the water. Along the way he handed off his keys, wallet, and chewing tobacco (clearly my story of saying an official goodbye to Tred was as bad a lie as the sea turtle).
Tred was gracious and made a big deal of the event, explaining the tradition and asking Joshua questions about his billfish release. Then with a touch of finger to chest, Joshua was “creeked.”
And the creeking was only one of the highlights of the Morehead Inshore Challenge weekend. Also on the list are stories of someone spending a childhood afternoon trying to cast net song birds, an outrageous tale of an uncle that died under a honey wagon, and an intern that on a recent phone call with a state detective used an analogy of him sleeping with the detective’s wife to end the call.
However, my strongest impression from the weekend was the gratitude that Max and I shared as we welcomed about 13 boats that had made the trip to Morehead all the way up from Wrightsville, Carolina Beach, and Southport. These friends of ours had trailered their boats, found and paid for a hotel room, tried fishing brand new waters, and all in the face of an inclement weather forecast (it blew 20+ mph on Saturday).
The Fisherman’s Post crew would like to thank, once again, those friends that fished with us in Morehead, and we look forward to spending more time with you in Topsail and Carolina Beach.
