by Christopher Sprague, Contributing Writer
Hello Anglers,
Since school has started, I haven’t been able to fish very much. We did fish our last SKA trail division 10 tournament, ChaseN’Tailz out of Jupiter Florida. My dad and our team angler Jason Phillips caught blue runners before the tournament, so we had fresh bait. We really needed a nice kingfish to earn more points in our division, so we treated this tournament like the National Championship. We had lines in at our favorite spot at exactly 6:30 A.M. The first reel started screaming at 6:45. We got it up as fast as we could and saw around a 20 lb. kingfish come up. Next up, we had multiple fish, all around 10 pounds.
The kingfish bite was on fire, but we just couldn’t get a big one on the boat. By 10:00 A.M we had around 6 kingfish, but then the sharks started to eat our fish. We did watch a boat near us catch a monster and heard that they had a 60+ pound fish. We kept on trying and finally we had a big bite. Our crew all knew that it was a big one. Angler Bill Brodbeck was on the reel, and as the fish came up we could see that it had been bit in half by a shark. He never felt anything through the fight to tell it had been hit by a shark. We weighed in later and had a 21, 18 and a 16-pound fish, but when we weighed the head of the bitten fish it was 25 pounds. Just the head alone was bigger than our biggest fish. Our next tournament is the SKA National Championship in North Carolina and hopefully we will catch bigger fish. As for the tournament “ChaseN’Tailz” is for a great cause and we are very happy that we could be a part of.
Tight Lines!
Christopher Sprague