Alex's nice Scamp
4th Little River Pro
12th Fall Brawl
Sorry its been so long since my last post. Over the past month the Twister has not been doing much fishing due to the terrible weather. We have fished on several of the pretty days and had great success on King Mackeral, Grouper, B-Liners, and Amberjack. I am going to post several pics from some of our commercial trips and tournaments.
I tried to fish all of the local October king mackeral tournaments and had pretty good success in all three we fished. The first was the U.S. Open, held on the first weekend of October. The seas were beautiful during this tournament, thus bringing out a rather large field of boats. Derek Savage, John Patterson, and myself caught a ton of fish and managed a 28 pounder, just big enough to make the board.
Next we went to the final SKA Pro event held at Little River S.C. This event allowed us to fish in our home waters which was a huge advantage. Our team had some good local information and it paid dividends. We ended up catching a 22 on the first day and a 25 on day two. We totaled 47 points, good for 4th place. These two fish really helped our overall standings and help us finish better than middle of the pack.
The final tournament was the Fall Brawl. This is a favorite for our team because of the great finish we had in 06, barely missing a win by ounces. The tournament was postponed a week which moved the fish off the beach out into deep water, a huge advantage for the Twister. The plan was to check out as many spots as we could searching for a good fish. We found plenty of big fish, but were always the wrong species. Alex, Derek, Austin, and Myself were worn out battling with Big Aj’s, Barracudas, Boneheads, and small kings. We had almost given up when I got a call from Mike Kennedy on the “Simply Storage” who had just caught several 20 pound fish. It was a easy decision to pick up our baits and make a quick run to the Horseshoe to join Mike for a last minute effort.
Once all the baits were deployed we trolled the spot for 30 minutes before our first strike. Derek grabbed the rod and begin to fight the fish. It wasn’t a minute later two other fish hit the long and medium lines, talk about a Chinese Firedrill. I grabbed the long line and Alex grabbed medium. I was under the impression at first that my fish was off, but she was just running toward the boat. This is one of those situations when reeling like crazy paid off. Once I got the line tight the fish was already under the boat and smoking it offshore. By this time Derek had his 22 pound fish to the boat and I sat my rod in the holder to make a quick gaff. I didn’t pay to much attention to this fish, because my rod still had over 200 yards of line straight out. Once dad got the boat on top of my fish it was a pretty easy battle, I believe the long run took all the energy she had. I slowly pulled the 25 pounder to the boat and Derek stuck her cleanly with the 8′ gaff. All of us were really excited that this was a great fish to weigh, but still believed that “luckly” Alex had a even bigger fish because it was fighting deep and making lots of circles under the boat. It took him another 10 minutes to get this fish into range and we quickly saw that is was another 20 pounder that was hooked in the side of the head, making it fight extremely hard. We were still pumped knowing that there was a good chance at top 10. Once all the fish were weighed the leader board had us in 12th place, not bad for a last ditch effort.
I’m going to the Nationals in Missippi on Sunday with Team Holdn’ On. Were leaving a week early to hopefully do some pre-fishing and find those big Gulf Slab king mackeral. When I return I will post the story from the week, which I’m sure will be very interesting!!
