By Jimmy Ewing
It all started innocently enough. Shortly after Christmas about 15 years ago, I returned from visiting family to find a paper printout on my bed with “Skeeter Eliminator Series” emblazoned across the top. A note from my cousin—a close friend and roommate—accompanied the printout and indicated that, overcome by the spirit of Sporting Man’s Christmas, he had entered us in a bass fishing tournament on Georgia’s Lake Sinclair. As we both aspire to be more like Jesus and my Uncle Buster, and we have proof that at least one of them fishes in bass tournaments, this seemed like an obvious next step in our sporting development.
We were both poor in the boat department and also poor in every department, but tournament rules would allow us to attend as “co-anglers,” seated on the back of another man’s boat—where the poor people sit. This represents one tier up in the bass fishing hierarchy from riding a bucket and working a cane pole under an overpass. We were each happy to accompany a stranger who owned a boat but did not own a friend to go in the back—all arranged as a courtesy to poor non-boaters like us by the good people in tournament management.
Our registration materials arrived in due course. We intended to catch a full limit of five fish each and win the tournament, so we celebrated our future victories with several expensive trips to Bass Pro Shop and commenced to sprinkle fishing equipment in inappropriate places throughout our home and vehicles. I was numb to our excesses until my girlfriend hopped in my truck, hollered “HEY! YOOOWCH!” with enough gusto to overwhelm the Robert Earl Keen sounds coming through the stereo and gingerly plucked at a chartreuse crankbait sunk past the barbs in her hind parts. She said this was the most imaginative way of getting into her pants she had yet to encounter. She was funny.
She is gone.
Her plump rump waggled its way out of my life to the beat of a Coldplay tune many years ago, but I still have the crankbait. There is a lesson in here, somewhere, about how to spend your money in your 20s. I will leave you to find it.
Life of the Co-Angler
Not long before the day of the tournament, I heard from a man named “Mike.” He turned out to be a Velcro-shod taciturn drywaller, who fate ordained to be my boat-owning partner. Immune to my attempts at levity, he made curt arrangements with me on the phone to pre-fish the lake before the tournament and get acquainted. We fished for an afternoon together, and it became instantly apparent that he knew how to bass fish. He used his equipment efficiently and accurately, hitting casting targets fast and with precision. I did not.
We toured the lake, talked fishing a bit, enjoyed a lunch of cold gas station chicken, and decided on a productive pattern. It is important that you understand gas station chicken if you intend to be an outdoorsman.
We concluded our time together by arranging to meet at the boat ramp before “Blast Off” on tournament day—a term I did not know and, it turns out, a moment in a man’s life for which I was entirely unprepared.
The way this works is simple—you know, like a space shuttle launch, or differential equations, or childbirth, or cold fusion, or marriage. Long before daylight, 200 trucks converge on one location, all towing large boats, all with the intent of pulling into one boat ramp parking lot and launching their boats …together. In a phenomenon unique, perhaps, to the bass fishing world, they are all angry when they arrive. I am unable to account for that mystery. Once the marvel and the pageantry and the drama of the boat launch is complete, there are 200 boats all log-jammed into one “boat basin” area, 190 of them with the motors running, awaiting “Blast Off.”
In addition to those 190 boat-owning anglers bent on bass world domination, there are ten boats, also on the water, that are not running. These boats have pieces and parts strewn across the deck with an apoplectic boat owner, wrench in hand, prostrate in the center. Those boats are easy to spot, due to the cursing but also the smoke—they’re either not smoking at all, which is bad, or smoking like a tire fire, which is also bad.
The Blast Off
At the appointed “Blast Off” hour, someone, it is unclear to me who, or how they were selected for the honor, stands up on a boat and begins calling out boat numbers through a scratchy analog megaphone made in the early ’90s. When you hear your boat number, you may depart and commence fishing amid the chaos and 5-foot rolling waves generated by 190 departing 250-hp bass boats. You, in other words, “Blast Off.”
I am told that daylight the morning of the 2009 Skeeter Eliminator Series Tournament dawned at the usual time but, due to the pea-soup fog engulfing the lake, we never saw it, and the tournament organizers delayed Blast Off an hour or so for conditions. This postponement sounded like good news to me since it was 22 degrees on the water and I had forgotten my gloves and also my hat and also to wear anything warm, but by the time we were ready to start, it was still bitterly cold, and the fog had only just begun to lift.
Once on the water, Mike (which I discovered is pronounced “Maaak” on his home planet) glanced at me and said, “Wwwaayyuull, when they call out numba 15, just hit me.” Then, to my surprise, he reached behind him, lifted an orange motorcycle helmet out of a deck compartment, and slid it down over his head—flipping the faceguard shut with a quick snap of his neck and a flourish.
Not being terribly familiar with bass boats or tournament fishing, or what was about to happen to me, I was a bit taken aback and suddenly began thinking of many questions. Unfortunately, the arctic air rendered my lips incapable of forming words, so I just huddled into the padded seat of his badass $70,000 Ranger Z19 and stuffed my hands under my knees to warm my fingers, feeling the embarrassment of not owning a boat for the first time.
Mike grinned through his completely fogged face shield and shouted, barely audible above the hellscape din of 190 outboard motors all growling together, somehow in unison, “Hey, thair, Jamie, now don’t forget—you better haaawwlld awwn!” Then, the bullhorn man, seemingly very excited and waving an American flag, called our number.
At this much-anticipated signal, I reached over and tapped Mike, tentatively, on his left shoulder. As if he’d been waiting his entire life for that one, brief, contact with another human, the boat I was uncomfortably perched on shot straight out of the water like that yellow buoy connected to Jaws, and it is at this exact moment that I began screaming.
The only electrical impulse inside my head able to wend its way to the surface of rational thought above the shrieking squall of the Evinrude 250-hp outboard pushed well beyond its limits was I am going to die without ever owning a boat.
Hammer Down
I looked over at Mike, tears streaming out of my eyes, the bones of my hands beginning to freeze and crack, and realized the fog was so thick and unnavigable, that he was simply following boat number 16’s bubble trail in the dark. The speedometer said 72 mph. My brain said … nothing; it was rebooting—with only a little twirling hourglass symbol projected against the backs of my retinas. My mouth would have said something clever, I am sure, but there was the screaming and also the excessive drool whipping out behind the boat from my flapping lips preventing any timely remarks.
When we hit the first wake, my entire body left the boat in a modified cannonball pose, eyes shut, hands clamped firmly behind my knees. I hovered for a second in midair, then landed, forehead first, across the bilge drain on the floor. Some miles later, Mike slowed so that I might collect myself, and said “Tawwldd you to hawwld awwn to that there handle little, fella!”
Hold on I did for dear life, and we scalded the water of the mud-brown reservoir for another 10 minutes to reach our destination. It was terrifying.
Our day on the lake proved tough, and the fish were uncooperative, but I couldn’t have had more fun. We talked about strategy and life and drywall, that jealous god—the blank canvas upon which many an ambitious GED candidate’s hopes lived and died—as well as which baits not to use (all of mine). Mike showed me some great tips for finesse fishing and rigging baits, which is a nice way of saying that I spent all day hung up and broken off. We adjusted rods and tried new tackle; we got hung up, and I fell over and stuck the trolling motor on underwater structures, and I learned to read Mike’s sighs. We even caught a fish or two here and there—Mike more than I but, still, a huge success in my mind.
At the end of it all, I resolved I would go forth and bass fish … but, for many of the same reasons I have long maintained a personal guardrail against riding on the back of another man’s motorcycle, I pledged to never ride sidesaddle in a stranger’s bass boat again.
Nothing else for it, I went home, and I bought my own. And that, dear friends, is where it all began.
