A Yooper's View of Fishing Tournaments

Fish Report: 6/15/04
by John A. Walker

Well, I guess even someone my age can learn something and realize that somewhere in the trip through life you got left behind. This past weekend I was at Cabela[base ']s Walleye Tournament in Escanaba. It was really interesting getting to talk to fishermen from all over the country. For a lot of them this was their first trip up to our neck of the woods. In fact there were a whole lot of them that had the whole family with them on this trip. Some even had grandma and grandpa with them. All in all most of them had nothing but positive comments about the area and the treatment they received.

Of course some of them about froze on Friday with the wind out on the bay. In fact it was so rough and cold that they limited how far they could run trying to get to the good fishing areas. You could tell the positive attitude some of them had when they had motor problems that put them on shore and still had a winning smile. It has to be hard when you work all year to qualify for this tournament, make the trip up here only to have your motor go out.

The thing that really left me way behind the times was their equipment. A while back I wrote an article in the Fish Report about the fisherman that spent $20,000 on some fish hooks. Needless to say the moral of the story was the fact he purchased a new boat when he stopped for some fishhooks. The thing I soon found out was that $20,000 would not cover half of what a whole lot of these fishermen taking part in these Walleye Tournaments have invested in their boats.

I was talking to the parents of one of the fishermen from Nebraska and they told me that their son had just graduated from college and invested more than $50,000 in his new boat. Man! I think I may have problems explaining this one to Wifee. Needless to say I sure realized I was out of touch with this fishing game.

Of course this does not include the large vehicle that it takes to pull this $50,000 boat. You can bet they have that much tied up in their vehicle too. Can you believe it! It could be that a lot of these fishermen have more than $100,000 tied up in the equipment used in these tournaments.

After talking to and watching all these professional fishermen I came to realize why I never seem to catch any fish when I go out. It soon became apparent to me that the reason was I do not own a fishing shirt! In fact I never really realized that in order to catch fish it is almost like hunting you have to have the right shirt.

Now this shirt has four pockets in the front and a flap of some kind on the back. I have no idea why you need four pockets on the front of a fishing shirt unless one is for worms and another for night crawlers. The flap on the back still has me stumped.

Of course if you fish on certain teams your shirt has more decals on it than a NASCAR vehicle. If a fisherman has everything in his boat and tackle box that his shirt says he has he may just need a tackle bearer to carry things around for him.

I was told that on the first day of the tournament they caught more than 1,000 fish and more than 900 were returned back to the water alive. This is really good when you consider how rough it was out there and the beating the boats were taking.

Besides enjoying all these people, I got to meet and talk to Jerry Kramer from the Packers glory years. He is one big guy and still looks in good enough shape to ring a few bells if he was playing. You could tell what kind of man he was when he would place a youngster on each knee so mom and dad could get a picture. He went out of his way to allow people to enjoy meeting and having their picture taken with him.

He said in his best year he got paid $27,000 dollars with a $500 signing bonus. I had to laugh because he does not have too much sympathy for someone who receives a six million dollar signing bonus and then whines and won[base ']t play because his feelings are hurt.

It makes someone like myself wonder how long some of the players on teams today would last with the old coaches like Lombardi and Landry. I have a feeling they wouldn[base ']t.

All in all it sure made for an interesting weekend and I think most people left with a good feeling about the time they spent up here in Yooperland.