Quick Bites: FLW Redfish Series Championship, Finals
2007 Wal-Mart FLW Redfish Series Championship
Orange Beach, Ala.
Final round, Saturday
Who said nice guys finish last? … After qualifying for the 2007 Redfish Series Championship in 49th place out of 50 teams in the Redfish Series Western Division, the team of Bennie Hatten and Randy Macik were admittedly “just happy to be here.” However, a strange thing happened along the way. After the first day of championship competition, the duo used a 12-pound, 6-ounce stringer to finish the opening round in second place. On day two, they parlayed a two-day total weighing 24 pounds, 13 ounces into the top qualifying position heading into today’s finals. And wouldn’t you know it? When all was said and done, the best team nobody had ever heard of converted the second largest stringer of the day into a championship title. “We’ve had a great week,” said Hatten. “Just making the championship was fantastic. It’s a feeling you just can’t describe. We’re living a dream season. We’re just glad to be here in the first place. But to turn around today and win this – it’s just unbelievable.” Macik agreed, “There’s no better feeling.” However, that didn’t mean it was easy. “We’re beat to a frazzle today,” said Hatten. “Going across Mobile Bay was terrible. We busted the head on our trolling motor. And then the high-pressure system that came in today really shut down our bite.” But the team persevered. “We started out fishing our topwater bait, a white Skitterwalk, which was the only bait that worked for us all week. But today, it just wasn’t happening. We went the first two hours without catching anything. After that, we had the jitters real bad.” But the team continued to hammer away. Eventually, after “hunting and pecking,” they landed two reds. And then their luck finally changed. “With about 30 minutes left, we found a school and (Macik) decided to throw a (Texas Tackle) silver spoon, and we’re able to cull.” In the end, the team walked away with a cool $100,000 payday – which was exactly $99,000 more than the team had ever won before. Not bad for two “nice” guys.
Toppling off a ladder, landing in second … Just about everything you could imagine and then some happened to the team of Brett Phillips and Mike Patterson during today’s Redfish Series Championship finals. After deciding to make a huge gamble and run all the way to Louisiana (a three-hour and 15-minute run one way) in an effort to make up a 2 1/2-pound deficit on the leaders, things got really interesting in a hurry. “We decided to make a 145-mile run because we knew we weren’t going to catch enough weight around here,” said Patterson. “We’re going to Louisiana and we’re looking for 14 or 14 1/2 pounds. That was the only way we’re going to win this thing. Basically, we only got to fish for an hour and five minutes because we knew if you push it to the last minute, you might not be able to make it back.” With that frenetic pace, it was only a matter of time before crazy things started to happen. And it started with Phillips, who decided to scale an 8-foot ladder in an attempt to spot and land some giant keepers. “I sat there and pitched and pitched and pitched to a red in a pocket, but he wouldn’t eat,” said Phillips. “There was a lot of wave action, and I was on the second rung from the top. Then, all of a sudden, I could tell we hit a wave wrong. I felt the ladder start to teeter-totter, and I knew I was going down. So I bailed out.” The result wasn’t pretty. “My left shoulder hit first, then my ear hole second. I also hit the side of the boat with my foot.” So there was Phillips, stuck in the Louisiana mud with the clock ticking and unsure of his injuries. “I thought he might be dead,” said Patterson with a grin. “But he came right up and was fine. Five minutes later he was fishing again.” Although the duo put in a Herculean effort, the team – which entered the day in fourth place – came up a little short, finishing the day a little over a pound behind the leaders. “When you have only an hour to fish, everything has to go perfectly,” said Patterson. “But we never lost a fish all week. Overall, it was a good week.” In the end, the team netted over $15,000 in winnings.
Wind washes away championship title … Heading into the finals, the team of Kris Walter and Danny Winters already had accomplished something no other team had ever done in the history of the Redfish Series – qualify for the championship finals in two consecutive years. However, the duo wanted something much more than another second-place finish. They wanted to win it all. Unfortunately, the wind had other ideas. “Overall it was pretty tough. The conditions really changed today,” said Walter. “The wind blew an extra 2 feet of water out of our creek. And when the wind blew, it blew the bait and our fish out of our spot. We also lost two decent fish today, and with this level of competition, you can’t make any mistakes. The past two days, we probably caught 30 fish. Today, we only caught five or six.” However, unlike the rest of the field, the day started off pretty well for the team. “Our first two casts, we had 10 pounds in the boat. And we did that by 8:30 a.m. At the time, we really thought we’re going to win this. But the wind really screwed us up. And from that point on, we scrambled to catch anything. In the end, we really didn’t have a decent low-water plan. If we’d had that, things might have turned out differently.”
Boat traffic, broken GPS doom Team White … Like many of the finalists, the father-son team of Steve and Barnie White encountered their fair share of problems out on the water today. “We had a tough day today,” said Barnie White. “Things didn’t work out quite like they should. When we got to Mobile Bay, the wind was blowing pretty good. Then our GPS mount broke off. I tried to hold it on myself, but I wound up cutting my finger. There was blood everywhere.” At that point, the team decided to temporarily abandon their plan to run to Mississippi and instead head immediately to their big-fish spot in Alabama. “The wind was blowing really hard, so we had to hug the shoreline the whole way. But when we finally got there, there were about 14 boats on our spot. People were anchored where we really needed to be. At that point we didn’t have anything in the boat and the weather had calmed down, so we decided to gamble and head to Mississippi.” But after the long run, things didn’t go quite as planned. “Once we got to our Mississippi spot, we weren’t seeing the fish and bait move like before. The water was a lot lower. In the end, we just bore down and finally wound up sneaking two fish out of there.”
Barge traffic ruins the day … Out of all the finalists, nobody appeared to have worse luck than the fifth-place team of Gary McKenzie and Sam Bertha Jr. After making a 160-mile run through rough water and burning up almost all of their gas, the team decided that the best course of action was to refuel before things really got out of hand. But of course, when things aren’t going your way, getting gas isn’t even easy. “The weather was a lot worse than predicted,” said McKenzie. “So we got to our fuel stop; the first thing we see is an 80-foot barge sitting in it. Because the ride had been so rough, we’d already decided that we weren’t going to continue to Louisiana. Our goal then was just to fish all the way back. But with the barge there, we couldn’t even get fuel.” With no other choice, the team decided to fish around the fuel stop until the barge left. “The barge took 35 to 45 minutes to get fuel,” said McKenzie. “During the time, we only saw two fish total and couldn’t get anything in the boat. By the time the barge left, we didn’t really have any time to fish. We just had a lot of strikes against us today.” In the end, the team did manage to get back to weigh-in safely. “But then we had nothing in the boat to show for it.”
Quick numbers:
100: Total prize money, in thousands, awarded to the championship team of Bennie Hatten and Randy Macik.
49: Regular-season qualifying place for eventual championship team (in Western Division).
39-3: Total weight, in pounds and ounces, of redfish caught during final day of competition.
4: Total number of limits caught during the final day of competition at Orange Beach, Ala.
1-4: Total, in pounds and ounces, of winning margin in today’s finals.
1: Number of anglers falling off a ladder in today’s competition.
1: Number of teams (Kris Walter of Hudson, Fla., and Danny Winters of Tampa, Fla.) to ever record back-to-back, top-five championship finishes in the history of the Wal-Mart FLW Redfish Series.
Sound bites:
“It’s pretty tough when somebody says, `Go out there and catch two redfish. Oh, and by the way, you only have one hour to do it.'”
– FLW Redfish Series pro Brett Phillips, on the difficulty of fishing for $100,000 when making a one-way, three-hour and 15-minute run during the finals.
“I don’t know what the qualifications for (weather forecasters) are, because they were just wrong today.”
– FLW Redfish Series pro Gary McKenzie, expressing his displeasure at the forecast, which greatly underestimated the wind and weather during today’s finals.
“I’d run 200 miles (one-way) for $100,000.”
– FLW Redfish Series pro Mike Patterson, brushing off the difficulty of his team’s 145-mile, one-way trip during the Redfish Series finals.
“It was a huge help. We finally got these guys trapped over here in our waters.”
– Redfish Series pro Barnie White of Brewton, Ala., agreeing that it was helpful to have a “local” advantage over most of the other pros.
“It doesn’t really work like that. My wife knows the tournament purse before we even get here.”
– Patterson, responding to FLW tournament host Dan Grimes’ tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Patterson tell his wife that he actually won $70,000 less than he might have in order to keep some money for himself.
“Ten times.”
– FLW Redfish Series pro Bennie Hatten, incorrectly answering FLW tournament host Dan Grimes’ question centering around how much more the $100,000 first-place check would be compared with Hatten’s previous best tournament winnings of $1,000.
“I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.”
– Hatten, after being told that $100,000 is 100 times more than $1,000.