Fishing right is hard work

I guess it’s because I write an outdoor column that people are always coming up to me saying, “Wow, you are soooo lucky. You get to fish every day, see all kinds of cool stuff. I would trade places with you in a heartbeat!”

I hate to bust your bubble, because I don’t fish every day. On those days that I do get to get out on the water, it is hard work and, almost without exception, I am laid up for the next two days gobbling down Advil like they came out of a Pez dispenser, alternatingcold packs and heating pads, and just generally feeling miserable.

So why do I subject myself to so much pain when I could simply stand back and let others do the work? In my mind, at least, there is fishing and then there is fishing done right.

Ask anyone who has ever fished with me and they will tell you I never stop moving. Fishing done right means being able to read the water where success has as much to do with meticulous preparation as anything else.

That’s the part I love. I don’t give a hoot about reeling in fish and, if you ask those same folks I have fished with regularly, they will back me up on that. Other than maybe a few flounder in the fall, I rarely touch a rod when a fish hits. My kicks come from working hard to make fish bite, and that preparation often takes longer than the fishing trip itself.

This past Friday is a perfect example as I finally made it to the Gulf Stream fishing in the S.C. Wahoo Series Tournament along with my good friends Dan Cornell, Ben Parker and Will “Catfish” Thompson.

The tournament is structured where each participant can fish any two days between the first week in February and the middle of April. What really makes things dicey is you can only weigh in one wahoo per day, so if you strike out on either day it makes placing that much harder.

Having fished in hundreds of tournaments over the years, I no longer get too serious about it. Rigging correctly is vital, but luck plays a big part in the equation. That luck aspect means being in the right place at the right time with the right lure and, most importantly, having a fish there that is hungry.

Leaving the dock at 3:15 a.m. and back in at 7 p.m. makes for one long day. But if I had to guess how many hours I spent rigging lures, spooling new line on eight rods that each accommodate nearly 700 yards of line, plus a ton of other necessities, it added up to dozens upon dozens of hours.

With wahoo having mouthful of razor sharp teeth, every lure requires a wire leader twisted to perfection. By the time I had finished rigging all those lures, my fingers had been poked by needle-like wire so many times I was more or less crippled. Every night, I had to soak my hands in Epsom salt, followed by slathering gobs of Neosporin on my fingers.

Fishing is hard work if it’s done right.

Arriving in the Gulf Stream around sunrise, it was a spectacular sight. The water was flat calm and as the sun began to edge over the horizon, I went to work. To say the least, running eight or more lines at once takes quite a bit of orchestration.

To make each lure run through the water at its most appealing takes a lot of fine-tuning. Drop that one back 20 feet, bring that one in 10 feet and constantly adjusting each one can make all the difference between catching and not catching. I’ll bet I changed out different color lures, each with their own unique action, a hundred times that day.

Up until that day, hard winds had kept boats at the dock for nearly two weeks but, on this day, it seemed everybody was taking advantage of calm seas. Unfortunately, the bite was ridiculously slow, which made the day even longer.

I think it was around 8:30 in the morning when I just happened to be watching a particular lure disappear in an explosion of water. Somehow the fish missed getting hooked but, in the blink of an eye, it hit another lure, missed the hook again and then a third lure, and we had it on.

It screamed line off the reel as Ben took the rod and the rest of us began madly reeling in the other lines to keep the fish from tangling up all the other lines. It was pure mayhem.

I was at the wheel when I saw a second rod bend. Yelling to Catfish, he grabbed that rod and began reeling like a crazy man. It’s quite the dance when you hook two or more fish at once because they can swim so fast, all it takes is one minor lapse in concentration and, in a flash, both fish can be lost.

Finally, I saw Ben’s fish and it was a nice wahoo! Bright purple and blue stripes mesmerized everyone for a second as Catfish’s line crossed Ben’s, but Ben’s fish was right there. I jumped down, grabbed a gaff, stuck his fish and into the boat it went.

The other fish shook the hook loose, but at least we had one — a 51.7 pound wahoo.

Amazingly, that was the only bite all day and, judging from the chatter on the radio, we were one of the only boats to catch a wahoo that day. In this case at least, all those hours of hard work did make the difference.

This story was originally published March 25, 2017 at 6:21 PM with the headline "Fishing right is hard work."