Jr. Angler: June 2021

My Fishing Adventures

By Christopher Sprague,  Jr. Angler-Team Tuppens, Contributing Writer

Chris with a 51 lb. king.

Hello Anglers, hope you all have been fishing and catching as much as possible lately! We recently fished the Southern Kingfish Association National Championship. This tournament was based out of Fort Pierce and gave out awards from the past divisions that we won a few places in. Unfortunately, I could not fish day 1 of the tournament due to school, however I did get to fish day 2. The team did pretty well the first day, catching quite a few kings and the biggest weighed in the low 30’s. Day 2 had a rough start since the night before, I woke up at 2:00 in the morning and had food poisoning. However, I did not let this stop me and went out the next morning ready to catch some fish! This tournament had a shotgun start and it was so fun to watch the boats all gear up at the same time and haul. It took us about 1 hour and a half to get to our spot in Jupiter. This was the hotspot, and EVERYBODY was there, it was packed. We set our lines out and navigated between boats. After about an hour we had a really nice bite, and when Jason tightened the drag, the fish didn’t slow down at all, so we knew it was a big one. We got it up to the boat super-fast, in about 3 minutes. Any much longer and he would have been shark food! Billy reached way out and gaffed the fish. Billy had an injured knee and really struggled to get the fish over but when he did, we saw it was a monster. We were ecstatic, and by 9 in the morning we had a good one. The rest of the day we could not catch anything. We tried to get a cobia off this one wreck, but this competing team decided to follow our boat until we left. When we weighed in, our fish was 51.14 lbs. which was super close to some other teams. However, we got lucky and barely beat them out. Our fish was good enough for big fish day 2 and got us 2nd place overall. We had a great time and congratulations to all the other teams that fished this tournament.