Check out this derby video, courtesy of the tournament committee and Mike Laptew of Stripers Gone Wild fame:
The first clip shows a very nice striped bass brought to hand. Next up, noted hardcore fisherman, sharpshooter and plumber Mark Plante wears his game face as he slaps an even bigger bass onto the table at the weigh station. He caught this 47-pounder in the first minutes of the 1996 derby, and it will go wire-to-wire as the largest striper caught from the beach.
The third segment has Mark and seven other top derby anglers on stage for a lottery to decide who will take home the grand prize pickup truck and boat. Keep a close eye on Mark, the one in the T-shirt. Standing up there with a shot at a $25,000 prize is nerve-racking, and he looks like he is struggling to keep his composure. He doesn’t win the drawing this time, but he had another chance in 2000. That’s the year he landed a 10-pound bonito to take over the lead in the final hours. Mark waited around in the weigh station to see if anybody else would top him.
“You should’ve seen him,” fellow angler Dave Skok told the paper the next day. “You’d think he was giving birth or something, wondering if there was still another big fish out there.”
There wasn’t, and the next day Mark won the grand-prize boat.
(Thanks also to the Pease family for crack video-conversion work.)
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