Tidelines – October 22, 2015
Our largest surf fishing tournament of the year, by far, is the Pleasure Island Surf Fishing Challenge. The Fisherman’s Post staff just finished up this year’s 36-hour fishing marathon on Sunday afternoon (this year registering 470 people to fish with us) only to wake up Monday morning to the pressing deadline of getting the next issue to print by Tuesday evening.
Michael Sing stands watch (hoping for a redfish bite) on Saturday night at the South End during the Pleasure Island Surf Fishing Challenge.
So we haven’t had much time to process all of the weekend’s details—what went well, what could be improved, etc.—but even without time for reflection a couple of details stand out.
One of the first details that comes to mind is the amount of money we gave away on Sunday. This year’s total was over $22,000, and the prize money went out to more than 30 anglers.
All the winners, as you can imagine, were happy to be on the leaderboard, but out of the 30 or so anglers, my favorite of the group had to be our Flounder Division winner, Unie Pendergrass.
Unie Pendergrass, from Wilmington, with the 5.4 lb. flatfish caught near Fort Fisher that won the Flounder Division and the Lady Angler award in the 2016 Pleasure Island Surf Fishing Challenge held October 16-18.
Unie weighed in a 5.4 lb. flounder that won both the Flounder Division and the Lady Angler prize, but what made her a favorite with me was the huge smile she had on her face. Certainly her smile was at its largest at Awards when I handed her the envelope with a near-$2000 check inside, but that contagious smile had been on her face from the start of lunch when I told her that she was up next to visit with our polygraph guy (all our top finishers earn a visit with Stan, the polygraph guy).
I’m also a fan of wins that come with an exclamation mark, and I would say that Dennis Watts, Jr’s top finish meets that criteria. All of our leaderboard pompano weighed between 0.5 and 0.7 lbs., except for Dennis’. His pompano weighed in at a whopping 3.3 lbs. The fish was so impressive that a number of the anglers fishing alongside escorted him to the North End scales on Saturday morning just to see how heavy it would weigh.
And while I believe our Pleasure Island Surf Fishing Challenge is very well run and professional, I make it a point every year at Awards to solicit feedback from our anglers. I tell them that the Fish Post staff is too tired on Sunday to retain their feedback, so an email or a call after a few days’ rest would be more productive. Some feedback has already come in: some productive and some not so productive.
One of the suggestions that we will implement immediately is more uniformity with the measuring boards. For our inshore boat tournaments, we use a Gator Grip so that we have a surface to rest the nose of the red drum against, but perhaps just as beneficial is that we use the width of the Gator Grip to determine a uniform tail pinch (we pinch the tail so that the edges of each side of the tail line up with the edges of the measuring board). Starting in 2016, every weigh station at every surf fishing event will be using a similar measuring board.
Then there was feedback that came in from an angler that didn’t even enter our tournament this past week. I’m not going to tell you what to think, but I’m leaning more towards filing this one in the “Not So Productive” category.
Here’s a copy of his email, which came in with the subject line “Hillbilly Fishing Tournament”:
“Could you post some results from your redneck fishing tournament you held this weekend, the one that screwed up me & my son’s fishing trip we had planned several months ago. Drove over 300 miles & paid quite a bit of money for a place to stay and couldn’t even find a fishing spot Friday or Saturday thanks to you! Could you also give me a heads up on any future surf fishing tournaments @ Kure Beach / Fort Fisher so I can stay as far away as possible & plan my future trips around them! Oh yeah, the only reason I was wanting results was because everyone @ Island Tackle, where we checked in my son’s 6 lb Flounder said we would have won 1st place in the Flounder category … But no worries, I would never enter a fishing tournament … period!”
We didn’t reply to the gentleman, but if we did my guess is we would have pointed out that they must have found at least one fishing spot if they truly managed a 6 lb. flounder out of the surf. Maybe we would have told them that their 6 lb. flounder would have won them $1800+, or maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe we would have let them know about our upcoming Topsail Surf Fishing Challenge on November 6-8, or maybe we wouldn’t.
I most certainly, though, would have signed the email proudly as Gary “Redneck” Hurley, Tournament Co-Director of the Hillbilly Surf Fishing Challenge.
