Sarley: Sometimes even pro fishermen make bad decisions on when, how to fish
When we were last together, I was telling you about my first day at the inaugural RCL Walleye Championship in Green Bay a long time ago. I was riding high and quite full of myself, sitting in 25th place in the amateur co-angler division.
If I could make the top 20 after Day 2, I would go on to fish the finals. An amateur prize of $150,000 was on the line and I thought I had a chance at it.
I met my pro for the second day of fishing. Telling you his name accomplishes nothing. He was a seasoned pro and had won a lot of money in his career, but for the life of me, I don’t know how he did.
I should have known that something was wrong when he told me that he had been disqualified from the Day 1 standings because he violated a very basic tournament rule. I should have known something was wrong when the morning of Day 2, he was close to an hour late in picking me up at the launch. I should have known that something was amiss when I saw that his boat was the most incredibly dirty and disorganized craft I had ever been on.
The floor of the boat was carpeted in potato chip bags and candy bar wrappers. I should have known that something was wrong when he asked me if I possessed a Michigan fishing license and was glad to find that I had one. He said it would save us time in not having to stop at a marina to get one. I should have realized that any angler worth his salt would have had details like this taken care of the previous evening.
He said that we’d head north to the mouth of the Cedar River in Michigan, a distance of 90 miles. I questioned his ability to handle the weather and big water and he assured me with great confidence that it would be fine.
Our weather this day was a frigid 35 degrees with winds of 20 mph-plus. He insisted we’d be challenging Lake Michigan and not fishing the bay. I wouldn’t have felt safe in a boat that was twice the size ours was, but I guess my common sense decided to take a temporary leave of absence. The pro estimated it would take two hours going out and 90 minutes coming back, leaving us 4½ hours to fish.
Our course was directly into the teeth of a strong gale. The waves were tremendous. I asked the pro how big the waves were and he replied that they were, “4-footers.” Having never fished big water previously, I believed him. We tried to ride on the crests of the waves, but it’s almost impossible to do so, and when we missed a crest the boat dropped into the swell with a hard crash. The buffeting was tremendous.
Our “two-hour” trip was completed in exactly 240 minutes. That is correct — four hours. I noticed that we were the only boat that had ventured onto the big lake. All the others gained their senses and headed onto Green Bay.
It was finally time to fish. My pro asked me to get the rods ready. I picked them up and was faced with an unbelievable bird’s nest of lines, lures, sinkers and other hardware. After about 10 minutes of futile effort, I decided to cut everything off and pull fresh line through the rods. All of this time, my pro rummaged through messy storage bins that I can only compare to what my children’s toy boxes looked like when they were pre-kindergartners. He finally found some baits that he felt sure would dredge up a heap of monsters. There had obviously been no pre-planning for this expedition.
As soon as we got our lines in the water, bam, we were hooked up with a beautiful 6-pound walleye. I lost a second fish at boatside. I looked at my watch. Although we had only actually fished for 20 minutes, I knew we’d never make it back to the weigh-in in time to not be disqualified.
I asked to return with the one fish we had caught. The pro seemed to think we had plenty of time. After much reasonable discussion (All right, I was begging and pleading) we began to head back.
See you next week. The best is yet to come.
• Daily Herald Outdoors columnist Steve Sarley can be reached at sarfishing@yahoo.com.