Tournament Mornings

[FIELD ETHOS]

Tournament Mornings | Field Ethos

By Jimmy Ewing After my initial introduction to bass fishing as a co-angler, I spent quite a bit…

fieldethos.com

By Jimmy Ewing

After my initial introduction to bass fishing as a co-angler, I spent quite a bit of time in my 20s fishing in bass tournaments with my Uncle Buster. However, it may not be fair to claim “with him” exactly—more like “around him,” “in his orbit,” or “generally nearby.” That is a more accurate representation. Basically, we attended the same tournaments, he was generally kind and helpful, and he tolerated my presence and woeful ignorance until it was time to go, then he returned home to tell his buddies about what an idiot I am.

It’s like that.

Imagine a situation where you find yourself confronted with a much younger, less advanced, perhaps “developmentally challenged” child of another ethnicity who speaks English as a second language, is also a relative, and refuses to leave you alone. Imagine this child has always been around and probably will never leave, and eventually you resign yourself to the idea that at nearly any point in your day, you may turn around to see him emerge from the yard—grinning and waving and thrilled to see you and hungry and covered in mud and sticks and leaf litter and bits of honeycomb. He needs help and costs money and he’s lost and hallucinating, and his nose is bleeding profusely on your rug. He doesn’t know his phone number or address, so you can’t just send him home—someone has to come get him.

It occurs to me that he may perceive our “fishing together,” even today, as something more like that.

We have had a ball!

Tournament fishing has given me, for the first time, an appreciation for an element of outdoor television that I never before understood, having skipped past Billy Dance and Jimmy Houston’s fishing shows in disgust my entire life, wondering why in the blue hell anyone would spend even a second of their time watching another man fish, of all things. Now I understand. However, the sanitized version that you, too, may have observed on channel 936 during your last bout with insomnia could never do justice to the grandeur of the raw, live experience. Let me set the stage.

The Boat Ramp​

Imagine that it’s cold and rainy and it is 4:03 a.m. You have driven 200 miles to enter a single-file line of 218 pickup trucks full of grumpy, hairy, unkempt men towing bass boats; all waiting impatiently to launch through a slot the size of a parking space behind a parking lot designed in 1972 to handle 50 trucks in peak season. There are not 218 boat ramps, but two. Two boat ramps. That means 109 trucks must move through each ramp in a delicately choreographed sporting ballet rife with danger, drama, and intrigue. You are smart, so you know that if each truck takes just three minutes to navigate into and out of the ramp, that suggests exactly five hours and 37 minutes of maneuvering is ahead of you. The tournament is scheduled to start in two hours and 27 minutes.

Assuming you manage to launch, you then get to Blast Off—a phenomenon tackled in this publication in a prior discussion. Blast Off is scheduled to occur around daylight at 6:30 a.m.

Of the 218 trucks and boats that must successfully launch, approximately zero can afford the time to experience a delay in boat launching, or it will plunge the entire complex machine into complete pandemonium, then, there will be shouting and gnashing of teeth.

One important point to bear in mind: you have forgotten to fill the truck up with gas. So, maybe the truck will run out of fuel while you are on the boat ramp and the entire process will grind to a miserably embarrassing halt with you swirling in the eye of an emotional storm. Also, it is 39 degrees and pouring down rain. You don’t know this yet, but it’s going to rain all day. You will soon discover that the rainsuit you bought, used, on eBay doesn’t rainsuit.

Now, for the exciting part: you, the boat owner and trailer-backer who knows how to boat-own and trailer-back, clamber into the boat, leaving the truck with some other guy behind the wheel. This guy is your fishing partner, randomly assigned by the tournament director. You picked him up 20 minutes ago standing next to his 1994 bondo-colored Ford Taurus in a Wal-Mart parking lot. All you know about him is that he is wearing pants and he is driving your truck and he speaks some English, but not all of the English.

Pre-Dawn Panic​

Pretty soon, that guy, who failed to mention that he has never backed a boat in his life, panics and selects someone else (a passer-by), completely at random, to drive your truck for him, while you sit in your boat on the trailer in the rain in your non-rainsuit waiting to get dunked in the water, thinking cheerful thoughts about warm donuts and wondering what is going on.

Just to be clear, the scenario I have described above is me, sitting in my boat on dry land, on a trailer, behind my truck, in a huge line of trucks, in the pouring rain, in the dark. Someone I don’t know who was originally behind the wheel of my truck has abdicated his seat and another guy who neither of us know, is now driving, and we may or may not be about to run out of fuel.

It is now 4:24 a.m. and no-one has launched a boat because the very first truck and boat jackknifed across both boat ramps at a 90-degree angle. This unfortunate dolt is now high-centered across the curb. Shouting has commenced.

The solution to the test question “How can Billy launch 218 boats down two boat ramps, which can never take less than 327 minutes, in only 69 minutes?” can only be described by a singularity, yet, somehow, the equation is solved successfully over and over again each weekend at boat ramps all over the country. It is, perhaps, the greatest sporting mystery of all.

Around the ramp—comedy abounds. Then, fury. Then, shouting! Later, everyone, by tacit agreement, forgets what happened at the boat ramp, and the comedy and fury are replaced with camaraderie… until later in the day two of the same boats want to get to the same cove and catch the same fish. Then the golden shine of camaraderie is replaced with mostly fury once again. Later, when it is all over, a renewed commitment to a sporting form of amnesia takes control and the camaraderie returns, allowing the contestants and their families to once again attend church together.

The Reckoning​

At the end of the day, I stood in line to weigh my fish alongside a gentleman who blatantly attempted to run me over, not two hours prior, in his best efforts to beat me to a fishing spot. I take exception to being run over by boats, but I took the high road to bass fishing glory and fished elsewhere.

As anyone who has trod that high road with me knows, the road is paved with unkind thoughts, and I had very many of those while on it. Finally, at the end of the day, as I stood in line to “weigh in,” with four barely-legal bass in a makeshift tournament sack made of four plastic garbage bags nested together and filled with water, nursing my wounded pride and unclean thoughts, somehow wetter inside my new not-rainsuit than the fish themselves; Uncle Buster appeared beside me, blatantly cutting in line, a fact which was cheerfully accepted by the members of the queue in deference to his obvious excess of masculine power.

He carried a large, clear PVC tournament sack filled with water and containing a positively frightening collection of enormous watery predators.

“You get a limit,” he queried, swaying and struggling to keep his plastic bag full of great green behemoths from escaping and endangering spectators

“Yeeesh! Look at your sack of bassmouths Buster! That one just burped a live catfish! You’ll win for sure,” cackled a well-meaning bystander, warmed and enlivened by his proximity to this legendary uncle of mine, known all over the South for his fishing prowess.

“Oh, you know,” he rumbled, cryptically, mustache quivering as he strained to keep the mouth of his fish sack closed.

“You got 5?” He leaned in, close, with a question I had been dreading all afternoon.

“Tell me you at least got five little ones.”

“Ah. Errhhmmm. Well. I got four…”

“Largemouth or spotted bass?” he rejoined, afraid, I think, that I might get confused and turn in a mess of crappie, besmirching his reputation as an uncle.

“I think they might be guppies,” I replied, with as much cheer as I could muster above the squelching sound of my tennis shoes.

“Did you throw the worm? I told you to throw the worm. It was every cast if you threw the worm—never mind. You didn’t throw the worm. I know you didn’t.”

“Ehm. No. I threw the other thing you talked about. The rattle thing. All day.”

He looked at me hard for a second, slumped his shoulders, and stalked off to cut further in line.

BUT THE BOAT RAN GREAT AND I HAD FUN!!! I shouted after him.

It’s not all about winning.