Three Julys ago during the Mississippi Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, piloting the 26-foot My Reel Mistress with a crew of three others, the Wilsons were caught by Tropical Storm Bertha on the Gulf of Mexico in 15-foot seas.
“The water would come over the side,” father Dick Wilson said. “We had guys bailing. I said, `If you’re Catholic, get down on your knees and pray. Otherwise, get down on your knees and bail.’ “
In the furious winds, they made a safe harbor, miffed that the biggest annual event on the gulf coast was disrupted. What is the forecast for this year’s 57th rodeo?
“We don’t care,” son Steve Wilson said. “We’re fishing.”
The night before the July 1-4 rodeo, Dick, 75, and Steve, 49, sat in the stifling 90-degree heat and plotted strategy for their four-day fishing tour. They were going to deep water.
The best they can recall, this was at least their 30th rodeo spent with a couple thousand of their closest friends. Steve could tell you all about the 78-pound amberjack he caught 80 miles offshore, taking a first place. Dick said he has one rodeo’s 46.2-pound redfish mounted above the fireplace mantle. Sharks, grouper, black drum, flounder and another 20 species of fish prowl the deep blue waters of Mississippi Sound and the gulf.
“We’re pretty much into what God gives us,” Steve Wilson said.
Come early July, the eyes of the South are on the coast. Fishermen from the area, but especially from Mississippi, compete for trophies, fishing rods and reels, coolers and a teeny bit of prize money. Against a backdrop of carnival rides, hot dogs, lemonade, ice cream and fireworks illuminating the night sky, the cowboys and cowgirls of this rodeo 90 miles east of New Orleans play out their deep-rooted regional tradition of fishing for anything that bites.
“It is a heritage,” weighmaster Mark Wright said. “The rodeo is the foundation of the coast. It always has been there and hopefully it always will be.”
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The American Legion created the rodeo in 1948 and ran it for a decade before turning administration over to the community. It was impossible to imagine the rodeo occupying organizers’ attention 365 days a year, requiring 100 volunteers to function and producing a $2 million economic impact for this city of 70,000-plus people.
“We didn’t have anything like this back then,” said Oren Williams, now 83, who has been involved from the start. “It’s turned into something else.”
Potpourri of fishing
Fishing began at 12:01 a.m. July 1 for 24 saltwater and six freshwater species.
“We are well-rounded,” said Wright, 35, whose rodeo connection began as a 7-year-old when he cut the grass.
His father, George, 62, a retired game warden and former scales boss, wore a badge identifying him as “Weighmaster General.” Mark Wright said he guessed that made him a major.
There is no entry fee–except for the one-day shootouts highlighting a specific species–and there is no limit how far a boat can travel to fish.
“Anywhere,” rodeo President Chuck Dedeaux said. “As long as they can get back here.”
The scales opened at noon July 1 and shut down at 4 p.m. July 4. The biggest fish sizes in each category were posted on a large board and all big fish weighed were laid out on a trough of ice (22,000 pounds worth used during the rodeo) for spectators. The scene resembled a fish market.
Thomas Gregory, 44, of Gulfport, was fishing five feet offshore in a 16 1/2-foot craft, waving a minnow on 17-pound test in a search for flounder or speckled trout. Instead he hooked a 71-pound, 6-ounce alligator gar that looked prehistoric.
“I was very surprised,” said Gregory, in the rodeo for the first time. “I don’t know how I ever got him in.”
The catch provoked one observer to tell about the time another huge gar was weighed, a big hole visible in its head where a shotgun-shell subdued it. Suddenly the gar groaned back to life, whipping its jaw side to side and scattering the crowd before finally being put to rest with a hammer.
While the variety of fish is awesome, the showstopper species is shark. The most famous fish in rodeo history is an 885-pound tiger shark Bruce Bartling of Jackson, Miss., caught in 1983. When fish too long for the regular scale are weighed, they are hung from a cable.
“The weigh pole we used to have started coming down,” George Wright said. “It was darned big is all I can tell you.”
The tiger shark was chopped into thirds to be weighed. Not so for 14-year-old Jordan Mathews’ six-foot-long, 143-pound-12-ounce sandbar shark, which dripped blood on the concrete pad in front of a colorful rodeo sign. Mathews, who weighs 110 pounds, will long remember the hour-long fight.
“It was dead weight,” he said.
From boat or shore
Chris Gallimore, 36, a former Ohio truck driver now living in Gulfport, set up his lawn chair halfway down Moses Pier. For those without boats, the pier offered alternative fishing access. Bathers frolicked on a beach 100 yards away and the L-shape point of the pier was about 50 yards in the other direction.
“On my first time here,” Gallimore said, “a guy caught a 6-foot-6-inch, 240-pound hammerhead shark right at that point. I told my wife, `I’ll not be getting in the water.'”
Another boat-deprived fisherman, James Coxe, a house builder from Gulfport, had a catfish in the box. Coxe said if he landed a hefty redfish he would consider eating it with red beans and rice if it did not compare favorably to rodeo weigh-ins.
“I’ll probably go up and see what they’re showing,” Coxe said. “Otherwise, I’m out a whole bunch of meat.”
It was redfish shootout day and Lawrence Milner of Gulfport toted in a pudgy 31-pound-13-ounce lunker whose sides were as much orange as red.
“They give you a run for the money when you hook them,” Milner said.
Milner said he entered the shootout instead of the rodeo proper because “there’s money on the table.” And indeed he won, taking home $760.
Perhaps the most surprised rodeo entrant was visitor James Stone, 49, from Jenkins, Mo., who hooked a big, strong . . . something.
“I had no clue what was on,” Stone said. “I fought for 30 minutes.”
He brought up a 92-pound-1-ounce stingray, brownish on one side, white on the other that with some computer work had the potential to star in a monster movie. Yet before Stone left the scale, another angler weighed a stingray at 93-3.
“We shouldn’t have let it dry out so long,” Capt. Jim Green said.
Stone rallied later and took the category championship after all with a 104-14 catch.
Two days after his brother landed his shark, 10-year-old Justin Mathews, who is even smaller at 90 pounds, argued a hammerhead into the boat.
“It was worn-out fun,” he said.
Mostly he cared about beating his brother, and the 145-pound-13-ounce catch did it.
Treating the biggest hanging, blood-dripping sharks almost as if they were Disney characters, spectators lined up to pose for family pictures.
By hook or crook
The dead fish business was booming. The smell carried from the hard-packed ice to the long line of rodeo-goers inspecting the goods.
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No one inspected the goods as closely as Mark Wright, however.
One hazard of big-time tournament fishing, even with more pride than cash at stake, is cheating.
By wrap-up day, Wright already had disqualified one fisherman for trying to weigh a flash-frozen flounder.
“The eyes are the giveaways,” Wright said. “And the gills.”
Douglas Martin, 45, of Ocean Springs, Miss., had been trying to win the rodeo’s green-trout category (that’s largemouth bass to northerners) for 29 years and was ecstatic when he weighed in a 10-pound-13-ounce fish caught from shore on a five-acre lake.
“I can put my hand in its throat with an inch clearance,” Martin said. “You can put a softball in it.”
Then a white-haired old-timer showed up and weighed a 12-pounder. Blew Martin away. Only Wright squeezed 11 bream from the stomach.
This is what is meant by stuffed to the gills, and it’s not a natural feeding pattern.
“It would have killed the fish,” Wright said. “It would have shut down his digestive system.”
Disqualification. Wright told the entrant to go away and not come back.
One of the more intriguing of the 620 fish weighed was a 46-pound-14-ounce king mackerel landed by Scott Lofton of Waynesboro, who was fishing 115 miles offshore.
Did he say holy mackerel when he caught the fish?
“I should have,” Lofton said. “It was very much worthy of a `holy mackerel.'”
And what of the Wilsons?
Dodging red lights, they roared up to the weigh-in station 30 seconds too late, two coolers overflowing with odd fish like a king eel snake and two redfish heavier than the winner.
“Stuff happens,” Steve Wilson said. “But we had a blast.”
Variety counts. Points are accumulated any time a fish is weighed, and at the end of a rodeo, saltwater king and queen and freshwater king and queen are named.
Very sunburned Dianna Fournier, 39, of Saucier, weighed enough black drum, flounder, Spanish mackerel and other fish to claim the title of saltwater queen for the fourth time, even as her husband Michael set a state record with a 61-pound-3-ounce black drum.
“My husband brought me into it 20 years ago, and then I got better than him,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to win this. This is the special one. It’s good to be the queen.”
Good to be Queen of the Coast.
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