Article by Capt. Franky Pettolina
Have I ever told y’all that I hate the wind? I know that I have told you that marlin have been frustrating me. Getting skunked? Yup! I have definitely mentioned that a time or two this season. Also pretty sure I have complained about my Dad and my partner in crime, Mr. Evans not wanting to pick up the breakfast tab on our lay days. But wind… have I mentioned that? Well I hate wind. At least when there is an excess of it.
You see, this abundance of wind has made it tough to go out and get frustrated by the marlin. And the only thing worse than a fisherman getting frustrated by a marlin is a fisherman not being able to go out and get frustrated by them. Boy, we fishermen are kind of silly I guess.
This wind is bad enough that it made the Tournament Directors for the Ocean City Marlin Club’s 59th Annual White Marlin Tournament cancel the event. This is the second year in a row that the event has been cancelled due to crappy weather. That trend needs to stop. However, it did get me thinking about tournaments that didn’t happen. It seems like there is a tournament every week all summer long these days. It wasn’t always like that however, and the tournaments we know today haven’t always been here. Except for the White Marlin Open and the Marlin Club White Marlin Tournament. Those have pretty much always been here.
So where was I? Oh yeah, tournaments that didn’t happen. Lets talk about that. Actually, lets talk about tournaments that used to happen but went away for one reason or another. Where should I begin…
Ok, I will start with the Marlin Club Overnight Broadbill Swordfish Tournament. This one ended before my time in Ocean City began. When I first started fishing out of Ocean City in the early 80s the swordfish fishery was already in full decline from too much fishing pressure, mostly by commercial longliners. In the 70s that was not the case. The nighttime fishing was good enough to host a tournament for swordies and there were great results. The most frequent story I have heard about that tourney over the years is when it was won by Buster Day and his daughter Susan on their boat the “Seven Days” which was captained by Big Al Fields. Big Al is still running boats here in Ocean City and is definitely a legend in this sport.
Unfortunately for the Overnight Broadbill Tournament, when the fish go away the interest goes away, and when the interest goes away the tournament goes away.
Another tournament that went away was the Ocean City Blue Marlin Tournament. This one happened back in the late 80s/early 90s. Don’t confuse this with the Branch Kreppel Memorial Blue Marlin Tournament that was hosted by Sunset Marina a few years back (which also, sadly, never got the participation we all hoped it would get and went away). The Ocean City Blue Marlin Tournament was organized by a gentleman named Clay Katski and was an all-release format. I was around while this tourney was going on, but I never fished it. If memory serves me correctly, Capt. Mitch Pierson won it on a boat called the “Whopper” one year and it was also won by Capt. Jimbo Farlow (a legend in his own right) running Dan Deer’s “True Grit” another year. I think Clay won his own tournament once too! Timing was one of the downfalls of this event. A couple years of slow fishing took the interest away and the tournament faded off into the sunset.
We have two great ladies tournaments in Ocean City nowadays with the Heels and Reels and the Capt. Steve Harman’s Poor Girls Open, but these are not the only ladies events to ever exist in our town. The first ladies-only event in Ocean City was the Harbour Island Ladies Invitational. This tournament was started by Liz and Jim Edmonds who owned a boat called the “Midnight Hour”. I participated in this tournament several times as a crew member when my Mom fished it as an angler. As the name implies, it was hosted out of Harbour Island Marina and it featured a unique Calcutta Auction where you could bid up a boat’s added entry levels and actually even buy them as your own bet if the boat didn’t want to pay the highest bid. It was a fun competition and lasted for many years.
Another ladies-only tournament lasted only one year. The Ladies Billfish Open. Truth be told, the Ladies Open was started to be direct competition to the Invitational, and when the spray settled, the Invitational survived and the Open did not. Maybe it would have been better to just get along?
Yet another tournament that flourished for a few years but failed to last in the long run was the Marlin Club Marina Shootout. The format of this tournament pitted teams from each of the marinas in town against one another with a trophy and bragging rights at stake. The winning marina would keep the trophy to display for a year and host the event the following year. There was a great deal of camaraderie and good natured ribbing amongst the teams in the early years of this tournament. To this day, I am not quite sure what caused the downfall of this tournament, but by the end several marinas couldn’t field a team and it was finally decided to put the Shootout to bed.
The last two tournaments I will talk about both seemed like good ideas at the time, but neither one took off. At all. Both of them were duds. And I helped start them. I guess you can’t win them all. The Ocean City Marlin Club Tuna Chunking Tournament and the Bahia Marina Tuna Mania Chunking Round-Up. I am pretty sure the second one failed because of the name alone. Capt. Steve Harman and I were both riding high on the success of the Mako Mania and the Poor Girls Tournaments when we wrote the rules for the chunking event. Steve asked me what we should call it. My suggestion was Tuna Mania or the Tuna Round-Up. I guess he liked them both. Chunking for tunas was, and still is, a very popular method of fishing. People love to chunk. You know what though? People do not love to enter tuna chunking tournaments. I don’t think either one of those tournaments made it past its second year.
Anyways, here I am thinking about tournaments that didn’t happen, and hating the wind. I think it may stop enough for me to go fishing in a few days. Hopefully the marlin are there and not too frustrating!
In closing this week I would like to give a big thank you to Dale Timmons for helping me get some of my tournament history straight for this column. If it weren’t for Dale this paper wouldn’t be here today for me to write in or for any of y’all to read. And I never would have met my all time fishing hero Ben Sykes. Thanks for everything Dale!
Capt. Franky Pettolina is Co-Captain of the charter boat, “Last Call” and President of the Ocean City Marlin Club.
