Fishing rodeo ends with wild final day (7/6)

Posted July 6, 2009 at 12:19 am
Filed Under Sports | 1 Comment

By CLAUDETTE OLIVIER
AMERICAN PRESS

A wild hard-luck tale and king mackerel finally big enough to make the leaderboard were just a few highlights from the final day of the Southwest Louisiana Fishing Club’s Fourth of July Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo.

“After driving six hours to Grand Isle, we launched our boat at 11 p.m., only to break the front running light and sink the motors because the launch was too steep,” said Cody Vidrine, who was captaining the vessel Wankatank. “Then in trying to fix the light, we broke it even more.”

And it didn’t stop there.

“As we headed out, an ice chest blew off the T-top of the boat and scattered food all over the Gulf of Mexico,” Vidrine said. “Then I ended up getting sea sick for half a day and John VanNorman fell asleep and got a bad sunburn on his back.”

Others on board the wild ride were Vidrine’s father, Warren, Shannon Clark and Brandon Vidrine.

“We fought eight foot seas while chumming, and we only caught one fish,” Vidrine said.

The trouble didn’t stop when the crew got on dry land.

“Next we broke a running board on the trailer, and 10 minutes after leaving Grand Isle, we broke an axle on the boat trailer, which took two hours to fix it on the side of the road,” Vidrine said. “After that, the air conditioner in the truck went out, and the wench on the boat trailer broke when we stopped to tank up.”

Eventually the group made it to Scott and popped into the store Best Stop for some cracklins.

“The battery on the truck died when we went to leave there, so we had to get a boost,” Vidrine said. “When we got into Iowa, the alternator on the truck went out, so we had no radio or gauges, engine only.”

The group managed to tough it out to Westlake, where they had to coast down the west side of the I-10 bridge after the truck completely broke down.

“We had to have boat and truck towed the rest of the way home,” Vidrine said.

And last but not least, the elder Vidrine lost one of his teeth, and the hole was clearly visible when he smiled at the weigh-in.

But in the end, 11-year-old Destiny Pratt landed the rodeo’s hard-luck award after landing a blue marlin and a sailfish, which would have placed in the event if she had been entered in the open competition, not just the junior angler division.

Also having some “hard luck” were anglers looking to score with king mackerel.

After eluding the leaderboard for days, the crew of the Builders Risk — Bill Breaux and his son Chase, Connie Newlin, Johnny Mice, Jim Hughes and Chris Cormie — brought in a king mackerel big enough to make the board — almost.

“It was a half pound off from making the board because we blew the gut out when we gaffed it,” Cormie said. “It would have probably made it if that hadn’t happened.”

The crew, who also fished the Peanut area, stayed offshore for the duration of the tournament after leaving out of Cameron.

As more and more boats returned from offshore the leaderboard filled more and more quickly.

The crew of Jeff Kudla, Rob Price III, John and Steven Saucier, Chris Lemoine and Mike Luttrell also left out of Cameron, at about 2 p.m. Thursday, and headed out to the Magnolia area, 150 miles out, and the Red Hawk area, 170 miles out.

“I caught an 80-pound yellow fin tuna on a Pink Stretch bait,” Kudla said. “It’s a wahoo-based bait, so it’s funny to have caught a tuna on it.”

The group also landed wahoo, a marble grouper and even caught, tagged and released a sailfish.

The Great Escape, with Keith Monroe, who captained the boat, Moby Goodwin, Wyatt Parks, Lanny Young, Jonathan Primeaux, and Stuart Ancelet aboard, also left for the Gulf by way of Cameron.

“We had calm seas on the way out Thursday when we headed to the Picket Fence,” Monroe said. “Lanny caught a marlin early on and fought it, but it got off.”

The crew also fished deep rigs for snapper.

“They were plentiful, but we turned them loose to fish for other species,” Monroe said.

The crew also hit the popular spot, The Auger.

“Seven other boats were also fishing the area, where the water gets to about 2,800 feet,” Monroe said. “We dropped our lines there for some yellowfin tuna.”

The crew also hauled in wahoo, amberjack and a skipjack tuna.

“The skipjack tuna is a rare fish that is a prized sushi in Japan,” Monroe said.

Bait used on board included plastics for the marlin and Spanish sardines, hardtails and poagies.

In keeping with the tournament’s unofficial motto of “fun with friends and family,” David Tadlock took his son Patrick Tadlock, relative Randy Tadlock Jr. and his son’s friends Ryan Foret and George Cestia, all of Lake Charles, out aboard his boat, Pipe Dream.

“We left Friday morning, headed to the Auger and slept on the deck out under the stars that night,” said the father, who has fished the rodeo for the last 30 years.

The crew brought in fish ranging from red snapper, cobia and ling to Spanish mackerel and blackfin tuna on small live bluetail and hardtails and artificial lures.

“We didn’t have any back luck out there, but we didn’t bring in enough fish,” he said.

The father-son duo of Prentiss Perkins, his son Garrett and friends Chad Soileau, Beau Tate, Kent Fontenot and Walter Tortorich, set out from a little further east of Cameron — Pecan Island to be exact — on board the Desperado.

“We trawled with live bait about 150 miles out,” the father said. “We lost a few big ones, but we can’t complain.”

Indeed not. The group pulled up to the weigh station with six ice chests loaded with yellow and blackfin tuna, mangrove snapper, dolphin, specks, and several other species of fish.

“We had a blue marlin hooked but we lost it,” Perkins said.

Locals Lane Daughdrill, Alex Broussard, Kevin Stanley, and Judah Levac left from farther east — Grand Isle — and fished 21 miles out on Friday and Saturday.

“I’ve got firstand third-place mangrove snapper and Alex has second,” said Daughdrill, who has competed in the tournament for the last 10 years. “I used poagie to fish just under the surface.”

At the end of the day, the only categories on the leaderboard left empty were triple tail on the fly, tarpon, sheepshead in the scuba division and triggerfish and Spanish mackerel in the junior angler division.

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Comments

One Response to “Fishing rodeo ends with wild final day (7/6)”

Jonathan Primeaux on July 6th, 2009 11:10 am

Can you e-mail me the picture that goes
with the above article of the crew of
“The Great Escape”
Pg C-1 in todays paper
Article by Claudette Oliver

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