“It’s been a very good tournament,” Larry Hardham, president of the Cape Hatteras Angler’s Club, said of this year’s 52nd annual invitational surf fishing tournament.

Last weekend, 720 anglers (120 teams of six) and nearly 100 judges took to the beaches on Thursday and Friday, Nov. 5 and 6, to participate in what is unofficially billed as the world’s largest surf fishing tournament, and many others participated in the Bob Bernard Open Individual Tournament on Saturday.

Like last year, inclement weather threatened the success of this year’s event, with a full-moon high tide on Tuesday, breezy conditions Wednesday and Thursday, and a 25- to 30-knot north wind forecast for Friday.

But, thanks to a combination of conscientious preparation and a fortuitous change in the weather, the tournament went off without a hitch.

Knowing that the east-facing beaches would likely take a hit, tournament organizers decided not to set up any of the 120 fishing stations in areas that might wash over or might be too narrow for vehicle traffic during a high tide.

This year, there were no stations south of Ramp 23, none at Ramp 27 or Ramp 30, none north of Ramp 34, and none south of Ramp 49.

And since quite a bit of beach was rendered unavailable by the weather and by the parameters of the Anglers Club’s Park Service permit—no stations within two-tenths of a mile of either side of a ramp, no stations within half a mile of Cape Point or Hatteras Inlet—tournament organizers had to shrink the size of the each station.

Teams are usually allotted stations that are one-tenth of a mile wide, but this year’s teams fished in stations that were about 20 per cent smaller, Hardham said, adding that, though the distance sounds small, each station is still longer than a football field.

As it turned out, the weather wasn’t nearly as bad as organizers had anticipated. In fact, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday all turned out to be beautiful, warm sunny days.

And the fishing wasn’t bad, either.

Most of the action seemed to be in Buxton, Hardham said on Friday.

After the Thursday sessions, the eventual third-place team, the Outer Banks Sportfishers from Nags Head, had caught five fish for a total of eight points. But on Friday morning, they were stationed just north of Ramp 43, and at the end of the morning session, they had caught 111 fish and racked up 195 points—enough to put them in third place.

In fact, the first-, second-, and third-place men’s teams, as well as the top female team, all scored the vast majority of their points at a station near Ramp 43.

“Some of it is luck of the draw,” Hardham admitted, “but there’s a lot of skill involved as well,” he added, noting that, the teams that are always successful “hustle.”

They always have a rod with a baited hook at the ready, and as soon as they reel in a fish, they get a line back in the water.

In the end, this year’s anglers caught a total of 3,171 fish for a total of 6,162 points, and the winners received thousands of dollars worth of prizes—much of it donated by local businesses—including rods, reels, tackle boxes, lures, t-shirts, jackets, knives flashlights, gift certificates to local tackle shops, and, most importantly, bragging rights.

Until next year, at least.

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