Redfish Cup

A look at Redfish Cup in Port Aransas

Learn more about the locale hosting the 2025 Yamaha Bassmaster Redfish Cup Championship presented by Skeeter.

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Due east of Corpus Christi, the fifth-largest U.S. port, lies the long-storied fishing mecca of Port Aransas. The small Gulf Coast town is site of the 2025 Yamaha Bassmaster Redfish Cup Championship presented by Skeeter, Nov. 7-9.
As big ships navigate through Aransas Pass on their way to and from Corpus Christi, the deepest port on the Gulf, the 10 two-angler Redfish Cup teams will scour the Fishing Capital of Texas for redfish.
Fisherman’s Wharf at 900 Tarpon Street in Port Aransas is tournament central. The anglers will launch each morning at 6:45 a.m. and weigh-in at 2:45 p.m. Famed Capt. Dee Wallace runs the full-service marina, with charter services available for inshore and offshore targets.
This will be the fifth Bassmaster Redfish Cup since the series was re-instituted in 2021. Port Aransas will be hosting for the third time, after visits the first two years. The region is known for its pristine flats, diverse wildlife and strong fall redfish bite. 
The event features a catch-weigh-release format. Each team can bring in two fish per day measuring between 20 and 28 inches. The heaviest three-day weight determines the champion.
The 10 teams, including six redfish duos from qualifying circuits and four Bassmaster Elite Series pros paired with a redfish pro, will compete for the top prize of $75,000 in the $100,000 total purse.
Elite pro Chris Zaldain (right) teamed with redfish pro Capt. Ryan Rickard of Florida to win the first Redfish Cup in 2021. They rallied with 17 pounds, 5 ounces on the third day to win with 43-4, ending Rickard’s bad-luck stretch of 17 runner-up finishes in various redfish tournaments.
The huge playing field, from Port O’Connor to Bird Island in the Laguna Madre, is protected by barrier islands. Redfish return inshore for a fall feedbag. Sunny days with highs around 80 degrees and moderate winds are forecast for competition days.
With cooling in November, reds come out of deeper holes pursuing pinfish, shrimp, mullet, crabs and pogies. They are often caught on paddletail jigs and weedless spoons, but Rickard said he expects some topwater action this week.
The sport fishing industry of the region dates to the 1800s, when the town was once called Tarpon. An angler dressed to the nines, standard for the day, was photographed with his catch from a rowboat.
Fishing became more popular with developments. In this 1904 photo, Ed Cotter, owner of Tarpon Inn, pulls a line of rowboats out to the fishing grounds with the first combustion engine in Port A. The long-held motto soon became, “Port A, where they bite every day.”
The renowned fishery created a need for the Farley boat, introduced around 1914. “The Farley skiff was the first saltwater sport fishing boat in the world,” Wallace said. “They had Model T or A engines. They had 5- or 6-gallon fuel tank. They used the car transmission to troll.”
Farley Boat Works, at 716 W. Avenue C, stands today as a museum that doubles as a workshop, where enthusiasts can help build a boat as it was done a century ago. Also, all around the city, there are Farleys designed as planters. One of the replicas greets visitors to Fisherman’s Wharf.
Across the street from the Wharf is historic Tarpon Inn, first constructed in 1886 to house workers building the jetty for the pass. It’s been rebuilt after hurricanes and was reinforced to double as a storm shelter.
Housing untold numbers of anglers, Cotter’s Tarpon Inn built somewhat of a monument. In the hotel lobby, hundreds of scales from tarpon, with info on the angler and his catch, adorn a wall.
On a quick inspection, the earliest date was a catch from 1892.
One famous visitor was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After an unsuccessful outing in the early 1930s, he came back and landed a 5-foot tarpon out of a Farley boat in 1937. Life Magazine recorded his visit, as the Inn displays on another wall.
In town, travelers coming south on Redfish Bay Causeway are ferried across Aransas Pass to W. Cotter Avenue, which runs past the Wharf and ends on the beach at the South Jetty.
Texas allows vehicular access to its beaches. Visitors can park and take a long walk down the 1,230-foot Keepers Pier, where anglers can access deeper water.
One might also run into the likes of Fawn Berger carrying a pelican. How odd.
Berger, a volunteer at the University of Texas-Austin Marine Science Institute in town, retrieved the juvenile brown for rehabilitation. “It has fishing line around its leg and hole in its foot where it must have had a hook,” she said.
A short drive discovered another curiosity — it was kite day at the beach. Hundreds of kites blew in the breeze, from lines of spinners to squid to an enormous whale. Quite impressive.
Dave Mercer will emcee the weigh-ins at Fisherman’s Wharf. The four Elites competing are Classic champ Easton Fothergill of Minnesota, Carl Jocumsen of Australia, Bryant Smith of California and Tyler Williams of Maine.
Mark Robinson and Michael Frenette of Louisiana return as defending champions from Apalachicola Bay. The Elite Redfish Trail sends the teams Jeremy Reeves/Recie Tisdale and Frank Risk/Bo Favre, and Austin Angel/Lance Reynolds come from the Professional Redfish League. The Power-Pole Redfish Trail is sending two teams, Darren Frost/Tony Vercillo and Ryan Rickard/Patrick Marsonek.
Rickard will be fishing his fifth consecutive Cup. As returning champ in 2022, he and Zaldain finished second to Sean O’Connell and Edward Adams at Port Aransas. Then he and Elite Justin Atkins were sixth behind winners Fred Myers and Cody Chivas on Winyah Bay in Georgetown, S.C. Last year, Rickard competed with his redfish partner Pat Marsonek, finishing sixth on Florida’s Apalachicola Bay.
All the action can be found live on Bassmaster.com as well as on Roku throughout the three-day event. Tommy Sanders will host the daily shows starting at 7 a.m. with analyst Peter Miller and Mike Suchan.

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