Tournament Dreams

Summer days during dolphin tournament season in Key Largo have everything to do with how hard you’ve worked at your day job and how well you have provided for your family; for if you have done these things well, you can feel good with yourself about running deep for the money-fish.

Each day before, during, and after work you review and fulfill your tournament list: fill out your application and send in your entry fee to qualify for the early entry discount, rise early and run the Lucky Roller to the patch reefs and throw net ballyhoo, fill your freezer with twenty pound bags of ice, take the boat in to your mechanic to service the engine, re-spool all your spinners and conventional reels with tournament monofilament, rig and brine ballyhoo so they won’t go soft on the last day of fishing.

On and on, there are new lures and teasers to purchase and everything from last year’s tournament season has rusted or frayed and is in need of repair or replacement. Each and every hook needs to be sharpened, new or old.

All week long, through the tedium of work, out there on the horizon of your mind, schools of large Mahi-Mahi crash schools of bait with Man-O-War birds picking flying fish out of mid-air shadowed by leaping tuna. You call it birds on the water, fish in the air and you can dream it while staring into a cup of black coffee.

Dream-speeding into a school of crashing fish you ease off the throttles. You are the first boat on the school though others are racing in from all points on the compass. You reach into the live-well for a live-bait. You bait up and cast it in the direction of the feeding terns and hold on for the bite.

Your bait toss is perfect. A dream-school of seventy-plus pound dolphin fish come greyhounding toward your live-bait and sound. You feel the line tighten and you let the line snap tight off your finger and run free-spool off the reel. You count to ten Mississippi and close the bail. You hear the voice of the charter captain who taught you how to tournament fish, “Let him swallow it down to his asshole” and then you see him for the first time as he feels the hook and leaps straight off the port transom with a bull-head so wide and strong that it literally blocks out the sun.

You sip your coffee and get back to work.

Thursday night you go to the Captain’s meeting at the new Skippers Restaurant and stand in line for your ditty bag of promotional fishing products, one ounce bottles of flavored rum, raffle tickets, coolly cups, and tournament fishing shirt.

You learn there are five hundred plus other boats already registered. Most of the captains and mates are drinking at the pool, milling around the weigh station on the main dock, sitting or standing at either the indoor or outdoor bars waiting for a review of the tournament rules by the tournament committee.

You drink your two free drinks and then buy a third before you track down your mate to ask if he’s ready. He wants to fish all three days. He has put his $400 in the Calcutta. You find Roger the Calcutta man and give him yours. Total money on the line is over 60K. You talk up your friends who have fished during the week and learn that most of the fish were caught in along the hundred fathom line. You will fish deeper. You always fish one weed line beyond the last boat.

By the time you shower and fall into bed you are hollow eyed from lack of sleep and so psyched up you can’t. You set your alarm for 4:30.

“Fish on, fish on, fish on,” calls out your alarm clock in a sexy voice. Your wife reaches over you in bed to shut it off and then snuggles in close as if she wants you to sleep in.

“Go make it real,” she whispers and then she brings her knee up hard into your butt.

“That loaded SUV prize for a new state record, babe. It’s as good as yours.”

She rolls her eyes and turns back onto her side of the bed.

You’re out the door and gone. By now, you, the winning fish, and the dream are one and you’re one for the money, once again…

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