One of the original champions of Daytona Beach area fishing died Wednesday. Royce Riehlman of Port Orange had a heart attack. He was 71.
Riehlman
It was 1977 when Riehlman and Johnny Hazouri of Ormond Beach founded the Striking Fish Tournament. To this day it's still our biggest fishing event of the year.
Back then, no one had ever caught a marlin here. Hazouri said the Daytona Beach Chamber of Commerce's reply to their request for support of the tournament was, "There's no sailfish here, son. You have to go to Palm Beach if you want to catch a sailfish."
The Striker changed all that.
Riehlman and Hazouri took out loans on their houses to get together $25,000 as the prize to lure angles to a tournament that would prove this area's fishing was world class.
It was thought to be the richest purse of any offshore tournament in the world at the time. The source of that money remained a secret until last year.
Hazouri didn't tell his wife their house was on the hook. So he was terrified when Riehlman wanted to come up with another $25,000.
"I said, 'Oh, my God! The bug has got him,' " Hazouri said.
Riehlman drove to fishing clubs from Palm Beach to Jacksonville convincing people to enter the Striker, Hazouri said. And more than 100 boats and some 240 competitors from Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and New York entered.
Local fishing has never been the same since.
Kenny Kitchens, Riehlman's stepson, said Royce would go fishing at the drop of a hat.
"He's the reason I'm an avid fisherman," said Kitchens, a retired Georgia state trooper who lives in Port Orange.
Riehlman graduated from Earlham College in Indiana with a business degree.
At one time or another he owned a haberdashery in DeLand, Lester's Diner in Daytona Beach, a local water reclamation plant, Inlet Harbor for a bit, plus 450 pigs and about nine head of cattle.
"He decided he wanted to get into the rabbit business and he built a barn 40 feet long and 40 feet wide filled with rabbits," Hazouri said. He went out of town for the weekend and the barn blew down and killed half his rabbits.
"Then he got into earthworms. He filled his barn with them. He said he thought he had about 15 million earthworms. He and his wife went to Las Vegas and the barn ventilator short circuited and all his earthworms died."
Riehlman is survived by his wife, Mary Ellen Riehlman; stepson Kitchens; sister Jane Downes of Ormond Beach; and sister and brother-in-law Janette and Wes Sweeney of Edgewater.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Tuesday at Port Orange Christian Church.
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