By Tammy Millsaps
Fishing Leader In Me (LIM) group and Swainglers teamed up and organized a fishing tournament on Fontana Lake open to all students in the high school. I had the pleasure of sponsoring the LIM group. We met once a week for a couple of months making plans. The group was led by student leader, Brittany Shuler. As you can imagine, it would be hard to plan a tournament with a budget of one-hundred dollars, but we did! Great Smoky Mountain Bait & Tackle Store donated many prizes and was swarmed the morning of the tournament with anglers purchasing their supplies, which they received a great discount on!
Parent, Kep Biggs, donated his time and scales for the weigh in. He also took the day off work to fish with his son and his teammate. We had a total of twelve boats, and thirty-six anglers: twenty-five were on boats/pontoons and eleven were bank anglers. Launch time was at 6:45 am and weigh-in was at 1:45 pm. The tournament was open to any fish species. Meli Myers and Hope Long weighed in with an impressive 12.7 pounds of trout. Siblings, Brittany and Seth Shuler, along with Captain Ryan Laws, Bass Guide for Fly Fishing the Smokies, weighed in over an astonishing 13 pounds of Bass. Tripp Peterson followed with 8.4 pounds of bass and walleye. Kinley Biggs and Nicholas Bishop were close with 7.14 pounds of bass. Brittany Shuler captured the largest bass closely trailed by Kinley Biggs. Tripp Peterson had the biggest walleye, Ben Franklin the biggest catfish and bream, JT Neugin reeled in the largest crappie. We had approximately 50 pounds of fish at the weigh-in.
I want to express my gratitude to all the volunteers that offered their time and boats for this event and took time out of their own work schedule to make this event happen. Special thanks to Jack and Joanne Parton and Jackie Corn of Great Smokey Mountain Bait & Tackle for all of the generosity! Swaingler member, Trevor Jones, donated a nice Abu Garcia Rod. Also, a shout out to Swain High School Administration for allowing us to fish on a school day!
Tammy Millsaps is the Leader of The Swainglers fishing club at Swain County High School in Bryson City, North Carolina. They fish once a month of the school year during club time. Contact her at tmillsaps@swainmail.org for more information or to support this popular club.