“The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.’ And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.” – Thornton Wilder
If you like adventure stories, the first day at the Pasquotank River produced plenty. The thrills and chills came from the anglers who left the river and crossed Ablemarle Sound on a windy day to try to get, mainly, to the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers.
Drew Cook compared it to a reverse St. Lawrence River event, where you had to cross Lake Ontario to get to where the big fish live.
“I kinda want to run over there again and have a chance to win,” said Cook, who is in 10th place with 16-14 after Day 1 of the St. Croix Bassmaster Elite Series tournament. “And I kinda don’t want to ever do that again.”
Jacob Foutz, who is in 5th place with 18-10, described his day as both “really good” and “absolutely brutal.”
“It was the worst experience I’ve ever had in a boat, honestly,” Foutz said. “It was as rough as it could be for 60 miles. It’s not that the water was big and dangerous. It was just the duration. You had to ride through them, and it just wore on you. I mean, it was absolutely brutal.”
Joey Cifuentes experienced the good, the bad and the ugly of a boat ride across Abelmarle Sound. He’s in 4th place with 18-12, anchored by a 7-pound, 11-ounce largemouth bass.
“I got the hell beat out of me,” he said. “I broke my trolling motor. I put a hole in the bottom of my boat. I hit a tree coming back, trying to run the bank out of the wind. I had a headache. I had a horrendous day.”
A horrendous day that included finishing in 4th place and a catching 7-11 largemouth. Now that’s an adventure story!
“I’m fishing in the Roanoke,” Cifuentes said. “I thought the wind was gonna be southerly, and if I could make it across the south side of the sound, I could run that. It only took me like just over an hour, about an hour and 15 minutes, to get down there this morning. But it took me took me two hours and 15 minutes to get back.”
More anglers than expected in this 102-man field chose to cross the big water on the first day of the four-day tournament. But you don’t have to do that to be successful. Brandon Lester is in 8th place with 17 pounds, 7 ounces. He said he burned only eight gallons of gas.
“There’s obviously a lot of the guys that are staying closer, fishing some of the same stuff,” Lester said. “It’s just backwater stuff I’m in. Everybody knows what the fish are supposed to be doing this time of year – spawning. I’m just kind of trying to ease around and slow down and pick things apart. I’m hoping more fish keep coming. That’s what I’m banking on, and I think they will.”
The last major B.A.S.S. tournament in this area was in 1981. Lester didn’t check it out before the area went off limits. It has made a somewhat familiar first impression.
“It does remind me a lot of two places, the Sabine River and the St. John’s River,” he said. “There’s just an abundance of shallow wood cover, and that’s pretty much your only option. It’s just cypress trees, shallow wood, dark black water.”
When told that one local angler had described it as “the Sabine River with Florida weight,” Lester said, “That’s accurate. Even looking at the leaderboard it looks like a Florida weigh-in. You’ve got a guy leading with 30 pounds, but the cut weight is only 11 ½ pounds.”
Finally, it should be noted that the adventures didn’t end when the anglers got off the water. The “service yard,” where various boat and equipment manufacturers provide experienced repair crews to keep the pros on the water, was a beehive of activity.
“It was the most I’ve ever seen in a tournament,” Cifuentes said. “I’ve never seen so many guys there. There were guys parked out on the highway with guys working on each other’s boats. It was stupid insane.”
