Adventure Fishing World Championship..Part 4 of 4..... "Everything Happens for a Reason..... the Finale"

 

 

 

 

The AFWC is a tournament like no other, it's a biathlon of sorts in which paddling long distances and fishing short periods of time are combined at the most extreme level.  Everyone is given a map at the same time with checkpoints located in strategic locations,  each angler must reach three of the four checkpoints, catch, photograph, and then release the fish back into its environment, the target species of the event are snook, trout and red fish.  

 "Everything Happens for a Reason....... the Finale"

As we all got a ride to our vehicles, I made a mad rush to my camping area to retrieve my VHF Radio, which would have been nice the previous 24 hours, and my first aid kit, being those were the only two items missing from my yak for the safety check, and I headed back to the launch area.

As I returned to the launch location with 15 minutes to spare, I sat on the bow of my yak in complete exhaustion. I was running on fumes and pure adrenaline at this point, everything that had happened over the last 24 hours was now behind me and all I had to do was stay focused and awake and maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance in competing in this tournament.

As I awaited the arrival of my teammate, Steve Gibson, from the Sarasota, Fl area, to arrive, I shared my experiences of the previous evening with fellow anglers Jorge Cancel and Scott Harper, the Roll Tide Team, but we mainly discussed tactics and lure choices for the day.  I had great success the previous two days on two lures only, the "kamikaze" Vortex Shad, and the "Seein Spots" inline spinner,  
and  my obviously, mind wasn't clear enough to share stories that were bent around the truth, so I was actually sharing information like I just received a dose of truth serum.   At the same time, I knew a team with a name like "Roll Tide" wasn't about to tie on a lure made in the state of the great "LSU Tigers" anyway. And while this combination of lures works well in Louisiana waters, I could only hope that the Everglade species of fish would attack them strictly out of curiosity, and they did.

A little while later as I was receiving information that both Russ and Elliot had withdrawn from the tournament, due to exhaustion, my partner finally arrived, I could see the look of relief, that I even showed up, and the look of, I hope he can make it, on his face.  We talked momentarily about what we thought the layout of the map might look like, and what lures we would be throwing, along with tactics of him working bottom lures, and me working lures that stayed higher in the water column, so we could attempt to uncover the pattern of the day as quickly as possible. 

As we passed our safety inspection, we were able to sit down and relax for a little while, which is not the best move to make when you haven't slept in over 24 hours, and during this time I came to the realization that I was, tired, lethargic, dehydrated, and starving.  As all of these realizations set in, Jason Austin walked up and handed me a sandwich that he had made for himself, he also filled my pockets with dried banana chips and a snacky cake, as he likes to call it, and it was like someone bringing water to a person stranded in the desert.  As I was devouring my, now favorite, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the Roll Tide Team brought me a pack of crackers, that they had quickly retrieved from their campsite just to help get something of substance in my system.  It was the greatest display of unselfishness and kindness from fellow competitors I have ever experienced, the concern for health and well being seemed more important to some than the actual tournament.

As the morning moved on, there was a mishap with the measuring boards that turned into an hour delay of the tournament, this only allowed my adrenaline to subside and my mental toughness to turn to mush. I am pretty sure at this point, I knew exactly what it felt like to be a zombie, and it wasn't a good feeling, with my stomach full, my eyes began to get heavy, and my hands were beginning to shake some, and it was all I could do to stay awake, but I knew if I closed my eyes at this point, there was no looking back, and an earthquake likely wouldn't haven woken me up. 
I got up from my yak and began to walk around, in large circles throughout the crowd of anxious anglers mainly, I had no destination in mind, just keep walking and stay awake.  During my walk about, I came across, our now famed cooks, Tk and Cebo, and Tk was having some depth finder/ GPS issues and I was able to loan him my spare battery to get his unit working properly, it was the least I could do after the extremes he had gone through to cook for an entire campground.

When I made my way back to my partner, the tournament director, John Grace, summoned all anglers to the Native Trailer where they handed out the measuring boards and within minutes they announced we could open our envelope, with the map inside, and start the tournament. 
There was a  mad dash to the holding area and anglers were ripping open their maps and launching their yaks simultaneously.  Steve and I looked at our map for less than a minute and immediately I saw the red checkpoint, which I misread as East Cape, the area where I had just spent the night in the jungle, and I quickly said we weren't going there, so from there we knew that the other three checkpoints on the map was where we were going to fish.

We launched our yaks and immediately went to the closest checkpoint, blue, grabbed our token and were off.  The tide was high at this point and everything looked the same, it was just open water all around us, but because of my midnight paddle back at low tide, I knew exactly where the drop off to the channel was.  We pointed our yaks south and headed about 400 yards out, I was throwing topwater and Steve was throwing a jig during the paddle out.  As we reached the drop off I immediately switched to the Seein Spots inline spinner tipped with the Kamikaze Vortex shad, on the first cast a 20 inch red followed the lure all the way up to my yak, but not being in the right frame of mind and not paying attention, I pulled the lure away from the red as I was taking it out of the water for another cast.  I was devastated, I knew missing one fish in this event could cost you everything.
Six cast later, off the ledge, I landed a 19 3/4 inch speckled trout. 
This trout looked 22 inches, he held his girth from his rooter to his tooter, but as we put it on the board, the measurement was clearly smaller.  I even recounted the inch marks on the board to make sure it wasn't flawed, I was convinced the fish was bigger than 19 and change.  From there, we took our pictures and released the fish as fast as we could, we paddled back to return our token at the checkpoint and we were off to checkpoint blue, a double checkpoint.

As we turned the corner on our 5 mile trip to blue, we could see yaks for days, it was as if the entire field chose to hit blue first.  Being we were now around 3 hours into the tournament and not one team was headed out of blue, it was clear that the fishing was going to be next to impossible.  We passed Dee Kaminski on our way to pick up our token, Dee is a phenomenal angler and known across the country for her guiding and her catching abilities, and seeing her still fishing her first checkpoint hours into the event created a huge shadow of doubt for us on completing the event. 

We received our token and immediately went into an oxbow close to the checkpoint where I saw several snook two days before, you don't want to travel too far because after you catch your fish you have to return to the checkpoint to return your token, but the water was muddy and Steve quickly suggested going back out into the open water. 
As we turned around and headed almost a mile south of the checkpoint, I was fishing the channels edge and Steve was working the flats on top, along with 20+ other teams.  After nearly an hour I didn't see one fish landed, my confidence was fading, and I was at the end of exhaustion.  I pulled up on a flat, set my anchor pole in the ground, laid my seat back, pulled my hat over my eyes and closed them. 
I couldn't believe after all of this I was going to throw in the towel, my body said fish, but my mind said sleep.  About 5 minutes into what felt like 2 hours of LaLa land with my eyes closed, I heard Steve paddling up and saying, " dude, wake up, you can't sleep now, we still have a chance." With that, I sat up straight, pulled up my anchor pole and paddled to a bottleneck I had learned of two days earlier from watching a guide catch fish with his clients, and I grabbed my famed lime green Bull Bay rod with a jig head tipped with, again, the Kamikaze Matrix Shad, and started jigging off the ledge.  On the third cast straight into the middle of the channel at the tightest spot of the bottleneck, I felt the strike, I set the hook with everything I had left in me and began reeling, the fish immediately came to the top of the water to show his acrobatic skills, it was a snook, and a big snook at that.
 With every jump I could hear Steve's voice trembling, don't lose that one, loosen the drag, you can't lose that one, you gotta land it, and within seconds, I had him in the net. With all of the excitement and loud banter, you could see the field slowly starting to move off the flats and into the channel, but we didn't care, we had our double point fish and we were re-energized.  We took our pictures, released the 25 3/4 inch for a total of 51.25 inch beast back into the water and we were headed back to turn in our token. 

All I could think of at this point was, did that really just happen, did we really just take the lead in this tournament, can we really win this thing? I was speechless. I knew we still had a long road ahead of us, but right now I was thinking if we can reach the yellow checkpoint, because we ain't going to red, we can finish strong.

On our way to yellow, I was gifted with the site of a manatee, I have never seen anything like it in the wild, his nostrils came out of the water and looked like the barrels of two ship cannons staring at me, he took one look around and disappeared back below the surface.  I took the siting as if the underwater elephant was a gift to what we just accomplished. 

As we reached the marina, where we had to portage our kayaks across land to another launch spot, we came across Mike Mcdonald (last years AFWC Champion) arriving back from the yellow checkpoint, I shared our plans with him and asked him if he thought we could make it, Mike immediately said, "no way you can make it there and back in time for cut off time, but good luck."  I told Mike it was our only option because the red checkpoint, East Cape(at least I thought) was way too far, and Mike looked at me with the most confusing look anyone has ever given me.  With adrenaline and hopes high, Steve and I re-launched our yaks and began our route. We weren't 100 yards into our paddle and I couldn't get Mikes look of confusion out of my mind, I told Steve to stop and lets re-evaluate the map, at this point we discovered that the map said East Clubhouse, NOT East Cape, and it was only 3 miles away, verse the 5-7 mile paddle to the yellow checkpoint.
We immediately turned around and began the portage back across land to familiar waters.  As we passed Mike at the launch again, I could see him internalizing his laughter for our lack of map reading abilities.

We put back in the waters we just pulled out of not 30 minutes earlier and began our paddle to the final checkpoint.  On our way we battled low tides and giant grass flats that slowed me down tremendously, and wasted around 20 minutes of valuable fishing time, because I couldn't peddle, Steve had to wait on me the entire leg there.

As we arrived, we got our token, and again I knew where the channel was from the midnight paddle back the night before, and we started our way several hundreds yards south to search for the ledge.  I saw three separate sharks feeding in the grass and maneuvering their way throughout all of the areas I was wanting to fish. 
When we finally reached fishable waters, I was throwing a topwater to avoid the grass, as we only had 15 minutes of available fishing time if we were going to make it back before the cut off time, and I didn't want to spend a second pulling grass off my lures.  All we needed was an 8 inch trout to measure and we would be off to the scales.  About 13 minutes into fishing I looked back to see Steve throwing a popping cork, I am not big a fan of popping corks, especially in clear water. 
Due to my dislike for this fishing style, everything coming into my mind at this point was now negative, had my partner, who woke me up hours earlier in the middle of the tournament, now given up on finishing, has he really resorted to a popping cork of all things?
Then it happened, I looked backed to see Steve reeling in a fish, the trout had his yellow mouth and head out of the water all the way to boat, he was showing off his heading shaking skills, that we all have seen when bringing specs to the boat.  It was a small trout, but it was definitely within the 8 inches that we needed, and as I was about to sound off in excitement and relief, the fish took one more shake and was free, we just lost the winning fish. 
I called out to Steve and told him, its over, we need to leave in the next minute if we're going to make it back in time for weigh in and before I could get the next sentence out of my mouth, Steve was hooked up again, and this time his rod was bent over like he was hung a cypress tree below the surface.  The 21 inch spec surfaced and I knew immediately it was a trophy trout, especially given the situation we were in, as panic set in on me, Steve was getting the fish to the boat, he lowered his net and the beast jumped out the water right over the net, the fish then jumped again, this time almost landing in the yak, but instead slammed the side of it and back in the water, three more times this fish went airborne before Steve finally landed it in the net. 
 It was a meant to be moment, and during this show, I  was paddling as fast as I could to him, so we could take the picture, release the fish, and hurry back to the weigh in. When I reached Steve with the camera, excitement was at a high, and so was my speed, I collided with his yak so hard he almost got the chance to practice re-entry in shark infested waters, but fortunately we both stayed topside and kept focused on the task at hand, get the picture.  I think we took over 50 pictures in 10 seconds of that fish.

We hurried back to return our token and we were off.  We had to venture a ways south and around two islands in order to stay in the channel so I could peddle, we would have never made it back in time going the shorter way due to the low water and grass beds.  I was peddling and paddling simultaneously all the way back, I kept telling Steve how much time we had left every few minutes, and of course I was cutting our time short to encourage every last bit of energy he had.  We made it to within 300 yards of the weigh in and we were deep in grass, we were both exhausted and it was everything either of us could do to move our yaks faster than the wind could push us.

Finally we made it, we reached the scales with 13 minutes left in the tournament. We didn't know where we were going to finish, but we still had high hopes of finishing in the top 5. 

We then loaded up our yaks, which took me over an hour due to exhaustion, and I am still convinced that without the help of Russ, my yak still may be down there, and we headed back to camp.

After a shower and eating all of Elliot's turkey I was able to take a 15 minute nap, it felt more like 15 seconds, and we were on our way to the final ceremony.  During this time, I heard stories of huge fish at double checkpoints, 24 inch trout at the checkpoint where we only landed a 19 3/4 inch trout, I even heard someone talking about the board wasn't long enough to measure their red fish.  Hearing all of this developed a heavy weight on my shoulders for finishing first, but from what I interpreted, we still had a chance of being in the top five, and that kept me going. 

As John Grace stood in front of the crowd and handed out awards for biggest fish, I stood in the FiN Crazy circle of friends and expected Michael Ethridge, our stranded in the Everglades savior, to pull off the win, I knew they had landed a couple red fish over 20 inches and based on the measurement totals that were being announced it sounded like he and Shallow Fly Walt were going to be sitting on top.

I knew what our total inches were for the day, but Michael kept his total to himself and would only share a glimmer of what it really was, so this led me to believe that his team was going to dominate the event. 
When they read out the second place winner and Michael and Walt walked up to received their awards, I was like a kid on Christmas morning, I clapped and cheered and yelled and was elated that one of my FiN Crazy team members was taking home a 2nd place finish. 

It wasn't until Steve's name and mine were called that it even sank in that we won.  I was so caught up in Michael being up there that I never paid attention to their total aggregate score.
It was amazing; to be named the 2014 Adventure Fishing World Champion was something that I never envisioned, having a goal of finishing in the top 5 was a steep goal in itself, but finishing number one is something I will never forget.

There were so many signs that took place throughout this adventure that until the 1000 mile drive home, I never put together.

From the exit sign of Yee Haw junction pointing a few rednecks south, to the hundreds of buzzards at the landfill warning us that this trip could yield deadly turns, to the midnight paddle back in the middle of the night showing me the channels, ledges, and grass beds, to the look that Mike M. gave us at the boat launch of our decision to attempt to reach the yellow checkpoint, to coming across three separate guides camped out in the bottlenecks at checkpoint blue two days prior to the tournament, and many more, it seems this trip was scheduled by a guardian angel.
 
Most decisions I make are always calculated, but the decisions made during this trip were calculated by a power a lot bigger than me.  While the points we chose to reach during the trip all had reason behind them, the paths we took along our journey were laid in front of us all the way, I didn't see them at the time, but now I do. 

We always hear the age old saying, everything happens for a reason, well after this trip, it's become clearer than ever, that everything does happen for a reason, sometimes you just need to open your mind to see it.