Take a Deep Breath...

Well it's about the halfway point for the action-packed tournament season that we cover for the members here. It's been a whirlwind, with as much time on the road as spent in my own bed and even more time away hiding around the next corner. The last few days I hit the brakes and tried to get to grasp all of what I've seen in the past month, just before the wonderments of that other coast open my young eyes even further.

It wasn't until yesterday when standing at a friend's house figuring out some small boat rigging to keep him from donating another combo to the deep that the distance set in. My friend paged through the latest copy of a magazine, pointing out pictures of huge, record breaking bass caught throughout the northeast this spring and summer. I realized that it was the first time I'd even given my usual quarry a glancing thought in quite some time.

It's not that I've lost my passion for chasing from pod to pod of rolling stripers or tripping down jetties along the Jersey coast, but when immersed in a world where 38-foot equals a small boat and the payouts top a million dollars, your perception is bound for adjustment. I've seen fish land on Mid-Atlantic Docks that I was sure would never swim through these waters or be seen on a sportfishing boat's decks. I've seen last minute heroics change the entire dynamic of a weeklong tournament. I've gotten to see the strategy that goes into fishing big money tournaments and the skill that the experienced bring to the equation. In a sense I've gotten to, in many ways, step deep inside these tournaments, living on the docks and sharing the water with this great game.

For some this life is normal, and in some ways I had a distinct advantage being an observer rather than participant. There is something though, the vibration of hundreds and thousands of fishermen, tightly packed into the bars and baitshops that brings an atmosphere like nothing else in life.

Before I get to the next chapter in this new adventure and wing west to the Pacific and further behind the velvet rope at the apex of saltwater fishing, I want to try to capture some of the amazement from the recent past.
---TBC

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