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Sept. 8, 2010

Homer Simpson may have claimed to have “discovered a meal between breakfast and brunch,” but we in the Robbins family do not allow ourselves to get sidetracked by those sorts of semantic exercises. That would just get in the way of valuable eating time. Put another way, if we were Italian mobsters, there’s no doubt we would leave the gun and take the cannoli.

So when the redheaded bride and I found ourselves, not quite by accident, in Lockhart, Texas at the end of last week, we turned a hard choice into an easy one. Rather than pick one of two famous barbecue joints in town over the other, we instead elected to double down on lunch.

Actually, for the fact-obsessed among you, there are four barbecue restaurants in Lockhart, a town of approximately 12,000 less than an hour south of Austin. They include Black’s and Chisholm Trail, but for historical purposes the two heavy hitters are Kreuz Market (pronounced “Krites”) and Smitty’s Market. They are run by two different branches of the same family tree. Not so long ago, a family feud raged and the eventual settlement was that one faction got to keep the building (Smitty’s) while the others got to keep the name (Kreuz). The latter relocated to a new building just a stone’s throw away. In both, the basic modus operandi is the same. First you go to the smoke-drenched meat pit where the counterman slices the meat you request in front of you. Choices include brisket and shoulder clod (a bit leaner), as well as pork chops, prime rib and sausages. They weigh it, place it on butcher paper and you pay for the meat. Crackers and/or white bread are provided gratis. Then you progress into the next room where drinks and a limited number of side dishes are available (whole avocados were a great complement to the meat).

Sept. 8, 2010

Fifteen years ago this month, I had two semi-momentous beginnings: I started my first job out of law school and I joined my first bass club.

The people I’d meet through the practice of law were pretty predictable and surprisingly homogenous. Those who’ve never fished competitively or as part of a group might suspect the same to be true of the anglers I’d meet, but they’d be wrong. It has been an unbelievably diverse group. More important than the diversity, though, is that through our shared experiences – long drives, dawn to dusk days in the boat, successes and failures – we’ve become a part of each other’s lives. Two of the groomsmen in my wedding were in bass club. None of the attorneys from my first law firm were even there, nor did I want them to be.

I’ve likely spent more time in the office than in a boat over the past decade and a half, but of the dozens of lawyers I’ve worked with and against during that time period, none stand out as memorable personalities for the right reasons. Sure, there were some I liked, a few I trusted and some I’d even want to socialize with, but that’s it – none I wanted to make a part of my life, no matter how similar our demographic characteristics might’ve seemed. By contrast, through fishing I’ve met many people I’d seemingly have nothing in common with, but who turned out to be like family. One such friend was Harold Pack, who I’ve written about in this space before. After a battle with various stomach ailments, Harold died last week.

The bride and I got the news from Harold’s daughter Sharon while we were tooling around Texas last week. It was an expected call, and with miles of Lone Star state highways ahead of us it gave me hours to bask in the reflected glow of my good friend’s memory. A decade or so ago, as I entered a period where I hated my job, was entrenched in a bad relationship and wanted to move, I found sanctuary in the home of Harold and his wife Gail, which just happened to be on a local power plant lake. From November through March, I was there early every Saturday morning, boat in tow, and left late Sunday night, ekeing out every last bite the lake had to offer.

By Pete Robbins
Mid-Atlantic Staff Writer

Sept. 8, 2010

If Gershwin had written lyrics to describe my past two months of fishing, no doubt they’d start off “Summertime, and the fishing’s crappy.”

If 20 years from now a still-youthful Denzel Washington agrees to play me in a film about my fishing in July and August of 2010, it’ll probably be called “Remember the Suck Truck.” In short, it’ll be the story of how some talented fishermen and one angler who apparently doesn’t know which end of the fishing rod to hold integrated the tidal rivers of the mid-Atlantic.

If my July and August tournament results had a Facebook page, the only ones who’d be pressing the “Like” button would be the fish, who have up until now largely ignored me.

Sept. 2, 2010

On Day Three of the 2008 Bassmaster Elite Series tournament on Falcon Lake, I had the good fortune to draw out with North Carolina’s Marty Stone, who at that point in time was driving a BassCat Cougar FTD. Thanks to the fish he found, it was one of the best days I’ve ever spent on the water: I caught my personal best largemouth, 8-12, which made up a substantial portion of my personal best 22 pound tournament limit.

On the pro side, they wouldn’t have even weighed that fish for big bass and the limit would’ve come in somewhere around the Mendoza Line, but it was memorable to a once-a-week warrior like myself.

I had no idea if I’d ever get back to Falcon (I’ve been back twice since). I also had no idea if I’d ever see that magic boat again. Marty found the fish. I caught the fish. The boat got them back across a choppy Falcon to be weighed and released. It played a role just as we did.

August 26, 2010

1. When in doubt, go with green pumpkin.
2. If you’re not sure you can get the boat into an area, leave plenty of time to get out and get back to weigh in.
3. Don’t use cheap outboard oil.
4. No socks with sandals.
5. When in doubt, put on new line.
6. If given the choice, don’t ever use the middle urinal.
7. Don’t wear the dye-sublimated tournament jersey to dinner.
8. Don’t assume your partner knows how to net fish.
9. Don’t eat Mexican food the night before a tournament unless you are in Texas or Mexico (quesadillas are excepted from this rule).
10. Always bring the rain suit.

August 23, 2010

The picture in this entry is of 7 year old Owen Conroy, son of regular “Pete Weighs In” reader Terry Conroy. After all of the 1 and 2 pound peckerheads, chips and dinks that I post in this space, I suppose Terry and Owen felt it was high time that my blog have a picture of a more mature fish (and angler).

Terry may be an anomoly – a lowly bass angler who went to ultra-exclusive Bowdoin College in Maine – but anglers like Owen are becoming more and more the norm. It seems like these days they pop out of the womb with freshly combed Shaw Grigsby moptops, dye sublimated jerseys and a list of sponsors to thank.

The email that accompanied the pic even demonstrated a fine sense of brand awareness. Terry and Owen reported that the fish was caught on “a 5” Senko in 194 with a ¼ oz weight and a chartreuse bead on an Ugly Stik.”

Personally, as someone who’s rapidly moving into the “old and crotchety” category of humanity, I’m against all of this youthful precociousness. There are enough people my age, older and slightly younger who can already kick my ass on the water. Can’t at least one generation be filled with underachievers? Can’t the Hannah Montana crowd stick to the video games that they already dominate instead of pursuing equal glory on the water?

I suppose this is nothing new. When I fished the Forrest Wood Cup on Lake Minnetonka in 1997, I prefished one day with Chad Brauer. The entire Brauer clan was staying at our hotel, including his son Colby, then 3 years old (Colby’s two younger sisters were not yet born). When I casually asked Chad if Colby liked to fish, he responded nonchalantly: “Yeah. In fact he’s already caught a 7-pounder out of grandpa’s pond.” At the time my biggest bass was over 6 but under 7. Ouch. Then Chad twisted the knife a bit more: “On a piece of hot dog.”

Seriously, Owen, good job. Awesome fish (especially for New England) and I hope you catch many more like it. But if you come to Yamamoto and ask for a space to blog about your fishing experiences, then we’re gonna have a serious throwdown.

August 16, 2010

[Get your mind out of the gutter, we’re talking about fishing]

The fire-maned wife hit two more milestones this weekend – one of them good, one of them bad.

The good was that she escaped from her first “away” tournament relatively unscathed. We stayed in a place that wasn’t exactly the Ritz, ate one Pop Tart after another and went to sleep by about 8:30pm (we’d gotten up at 3am Saturday morning to make it down by daylight to practice).

The bad news is that she put up a goose egg on the scorecard. No keepers to her credit.

I was afraid that might happen to one or both of us after Saturday’s practice day, when we had a grand total of three bites and put exactly zero fish in the boat. I still don’t know why we didn’t figure anything out. We were definitely around fish and tried a wealth of techniques and lures. Additionally, the site of our Sunday tournament, the Chickahominy River, is a body of water where I’ve done well in the past, although most of my past success has been in the May/June timeframe.

Because of the fear of zeroes, I breathed a sigh of relief when a spunky 14-inch bass inhaled my Sugoi Splash popper at 6:30am on tournament day and found himself in the livewell approximately 30 seconds later. Unfortunately Hanna did not have the same good fortune. Two fish that appeared to be legal blew up on her custom-painted Pop-R and subsequently failed to find one of the six hooks embedded in their jaws. Two other fish managed to hook themselves on her bait but were too short to weigh in.

When I caught my second fish, a near four-pounder, at a little bit after nine, I think it deflated her a bit more. I had a pair in the well and she felt more hopeless. If anything, she should have felt more confident – apparently there were still some bites after the first light not-quite-a-flurry. She seemed convinced fairly early on that she wasn’t going to catch one, and while I can’t confirm it 100%, I think that affected her casting, her concentration and the whole attitude. She kept casting until the end, but not necessarily competing.

I don’t think that all fish in a five-fish limit are equally hard to get. Two, three and four seem to come easier than going from zero to one, or from four to five. Of course going from blanksville to being on the board is the toughest hurdle of all. It’s as hard as getting the first pickle out of the jar. There are guys out there – anglers like Denny Brauer, Kelly Jordon and Gary Dobyns – whose success is the direct result of the fact that they don’t fear an empty livewell as much as they fear mediocrity, but they’re few and far between.

Blanking is a rite of passage that all of us go through and that no one is immune to. Hell, even KVD blanked one day last year on the Mississippi River in Ft. Madison, Iowa. Still, knowing that fact doesn’t make it any easier. Every time it happens it sucks worse than the last time. I know, I’ve been there before and unfortunately at some point in the future it’ll probably happen to me again, no matter how much I hate it.

Compounding her frustration was the fact that we had a three hour drive home. Plenty of time to stew about the two days of suckitude.

The nice thing is that there’s always another derby around the corner, a chance to suck again or hopefully to redeem yourself.

August 13, 2010

Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game
Reminiscin' when it wasn't all business
If it got where it started
So we all gather here for the dearly departed

--Nas, “Hip Hop is Dead”

In the words of that little Poltergeist girl: “They’re heee-ee-eee-re.”

First it was Don Logan, media mogul, and Jim Copeland, finance wiz.

Now comes T. Boone Pickens, wildcatter, corporate raider, billionaire. (Rumor has it you don’t get the initial before two names until you really start rockin’ the Benjamins…unless of course you’re a serial killer).

August 11, 2010

The redheaded wife and I made the hour-plus haul up Interstate 95 Saturday morning to Charm City (that’s Baltimore, hon) to attend the 2010 National Sports Collectors Convention.

I haven’t bought a pack of baseball cards since I was a kid, but once I saw a photo retrospective that ESPN’s Bill Simmons did after last year’s show (from the “Mistake on the Lake” - look through the galleries, they’re worth the time -- http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/intro/090805) I knew that I couldn’t not attend when it came close to home.

For a few hours, passing through aisle after aisle of Cal Ripken and Derek Jeter autographed photos, I was enthralled. It was definitely worth the time, the effort and the hefty entrance fee. No matter how homely you may be, if you want to feel like Fabio, a baseball card show is a good place to go. Let me put it this way: if the average Bassarama attendee is an 8 on the dork scale and the average attendee at one of my father-in-law’s model train shows is a 9, then the average visitor to the extravaganza in Baltimore (and I’m including myself in this group) was a stunning 9.5, even with a downgrade from the Bulgarian judge. You couldn’t swing a slightly-torn 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers pennant without hitting someone who looked like “Comic Book Guy” from The Simpsons. I won’t get too graphic, either, but if you have ovaries, you would be outnumbered 9 or 10 to 1 by those who don’t.

August 4, 2010

You can never have too many lures or too many t-shirts.

That’s actually a pretty good slogan. Somebody should put it on a bumper sticker….or a t-shirt. My dresser drawers overflow with t-shirts, most of them fishing related. There are Yamamoto tees of all colors of the rainbow. I have eight white t-shirts from the 2009 Toyota Texas Bass Classic (long story). There are Mercury Outboard shirts commissioned for the 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008 Bassmaster Classics (I missed the ’07 rodeo and they must’ve had a budget cut in ’09). I have a bright yellow model from the River Rat Tackle Store in Brewerton, NY. Surely there are at least two dozen others, from various fishing locales and tackle companies, some of them long since out of business. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but add to my collection this week.

Because I could not attend ICAST this year, I have obsessed over others’ coverage of the show, particularly the pieces from the similarly obsessive crew at TackleTour.com. In their review of Dobyns Rods’ 2010-2011 offerings (http://tackletour.com/reviewicast10dobyns.html), I was intrigued by the rods but fascinated by the t-shirts that could be viewed in the background. Yes, I have a problem.

I took the pictures from the web review and blew them up like the Warren Commission on the Zapruder film. Upon examination, it became clear that Gary was displaying shirts at the show that had the slogan “Don’t Fish Chicken…Fish to Win” written around a cartoonish piece of poultry.

There are lots of fishing tees out there, but most just have a logo or a brand name. The Dobyns tees have an attitude.

For those of you who’ve followed his career (and if you don’t, you should), Gary has long stated that he fishes exclusively for the winning fish. There’s nothing he hates more than having five green turdfish in the livewell and needing to cull them all. He’d rather win occasionally and have a string of triple digit finishes than an unending string of merely decent results. Unfortunately, some other outdoor writer beat me to the interview on this topic years ago, but later Gary and I combined on a follow-up piece for this website, so at least I feel I have some claim to history.

I don’t claim to know him well, but I know him well enough to say that when he says he hates “fishin’ chicken,” Dobyns is one of the few pros who means it. Two others I can think of are Denny Brauer and Kelly Jordon. It takes some monstrous onions to go out there and risk a blank on a public stage in the pursuit of angling glory, but those guys have it. I don’t, at least not yet, and I’d guess that if someone hooked up electrodes to their nether-regions, 90+ percent of tour-level pros would have to admit the same thing.

At some point during every conversation with Gary, whether it lasts five minutes or two hours, whether it be in person or on the phone, he eventually utters the phrase, “Now I’ll get off my soap box.” I always encourage him not to do so. Getting off the soap box is the verbal equivalent of fishing chicken. If anyone’s entitled to have opinions about the sport of bass fishing, and strong opinions at that, it’s the Big Okie. Go for broke. You’ve earned it.

If you buy into Gary’s concept that “fishin’ chicken” sucks, or wish you could live your own life that way, at least buy the t-shirt. Better yet, buy five or six of his sticks (www.dobynsrods.com) . They’re badass winning tools.

Now I’ll get off my soap box.