For 65 years, event has produced great tales, including ones that got away
For an outdoor writer, events like the Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo are the equivalent to a 1-foot birdie putt on the PGA Tour or a breakaway slam dunk in the NBA.
It’s a “can’t miss” situation, where the reporter just shows up and waits for a story to come to the weigh-in. I should know; I covered about 30 of the events during my career.
The 65th version of the Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo will be held Thursday (July 4) through Sunday (July 7), back at its traditional home at Gulfport’s Small Craft Harbor.
It was there that the first 57 Rodeos were staged. The last seven were held in four different locations — two each in Lyman, Biloxi and Long Beach, and one in a Casino parking garage in Gulfport — after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Small Craft Harbor and its Rice Pavilion shortly after the 2005 event.
“It feels good, you know, like we are going home,” said Mark Wright, the Rodeo’s weighmaster. “This is a family event, and by that I don’t just mean it’s a family attraction. It is that, but it is also a family event in that most of the current Rodeo staff are second- and even third-generation directors.”
Wright is one of them. His dad George Wright was the previous weighmaster, and his mom and his sister helped track, score and post the catches for over two decades.
“From that perspective, it means so much to be going back to the Gulfport Small Craft Harbor,” Wright said. “So much history. So much tradition. So much fun.”
So many great stories…
Among my favorites is this jewel, which adds very little to the family theme of the event. It is about two things that got away — a reportedly big speckled trout and the whole story.
One night,about 30 minutes before the 10 o’clock closing of the scales, two fishermen from Slidell, La., stumbled up to the gate, swaying as they tried to find, and then interpret the speckled trout line on the scoreboard. The weekly leader was a decent fish, nearly seven pounds, but they were interested in the Rodeo record speck, which was just over 10 pounds.
Noticing their condition, and relishing the possibility of an alcohol-enhanced story, I moved over and asked if they needed help.
“Tell me, dude, dey still give $500 for breaking one of dem Rodeo records?” one asked. I told them that the Rodeo sure did.
“For a speckled trout?” he asked again. Yep, I said.
“Well tell dem to get ready to write us a check,” he said, “cause we got dat beat by a mile. We got a gator trout at Lake Pontchartrain today. Oh yeah, we got dat. It’s in our car.”
I followed them to the parking lot just outside the gates, and they led me to an ol’ station wagon that appeared red until I touched it and discovered it was just rusted, much like the two ol’ drunk anglers.
I learned they were brothers, who fished together often, obviously shared a love of cold beer and stood about 5-foot-7 and weighed about 150 pounds. All of that becomes important when they told me how they had ascertained the weight. One of the brothers had stepped on house scales, got his weight and then the other handed him the big fish.
“He gained nearly 12 pounds when I handed him dat fish,” his brother said. “Like he had eaten a bowling ball and washed it down with a coupla cases of dat cold beer right dere.”
They laughed, staggering and holding on to each other.
They opened the back door of the vehicle and I spotted three identical blue ice chests, which they pulled to the back door.
The first one was opened and it was packed to the top with beer.
The second one was mostly empty but a couple of beers, ice and water.
“See, I tol’ you it was a case-of-beer drive over here,” one said, grabbing the last two cans and tossing one to his brother and opening the other for himself.
Then he grabbed the other ice chest and opened it — ice, half melted, and nothing else.
“Hey Bro, where’s da fish at,” one said.
“I don’t know Bro, you was supposed to put it in dat chest,” said the other.
The next 60 seconds may have produced words suitable for print, but not very many. Between frantically spoken, and very colorful Cajun lingo, and a complete search and re-search of the vehicle — including, I swear on my mother’s grave, under the hood — I discerned that the speck was missing and that the two bothers were each accusing the other.
I was quite sure the blame rested solely on beer.
No doubt it played a huge role, especially after I learned that the empty cooler once held a third case that was depleted during the day’s fishing and fish cleaning before being turned into a fish hauler for the missing speck.
One of the brothers reached in the empty box, grabbed a handful of water, tasted it and said “Bro, ain’t no fish e’er been in dat.”
As best I could decipher, here’s what had happened. The two brothers had gone fishing that day at Lake Pontchartrain and had caught a bunch of trout, among them the biggest either had ever caught.
When they arrived home, they decided to clean the rest of the fish and put the big one on ice to take to the Rodeo. Somewhere between the separation of fish and the arrival in Gulfport, the big speck went missing.
Did they clean it?
Did they put it in another ice chest?
Did they leave it sitting out on the ground or on a table?
Did they try to drink it and, thinking it empty, throw it at a road sign?
I never got the answer to those questions, which I did indeed ask, and to this day I am disappointed in my failure to get a phone number for the two numbskulls to follow up on the story.
I will never forget the last time I saw them. They had gotten back into the rusty ol’ rattletrap station wagon, closed the doors and, on the third try, got the danged thing started.
They backed out of the weigh-in area, narrowly missing two barrels and a police car, and headed toward the exit, all the while screaming accusations at each other.
I started to walk away, but I heard their car sliding to a stop on the shell-bed road. I turned to see one of the two brothers jump out of the passenger side, run around behind the car, open the rear door, grab four cans of beer, shut the rear door and get back in the car.
Shells flew as the two guys began their race back to Slidell to look for the missing trout.
I still wonder…
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