The derby is underway, and as usual the Vineyard Gazette and The Martha’s Vineyard Times are giving it richly detailed coverage. Check it out here and here. The Times piece relates one of the untold stories of last year’s derby and proves again that when it comes to the derby, prizes aren’t everything.
Check out the online leaderboard at mvderby.com. You can also get your derby fix on Twitter.
Readers of The Big One have been emailing me over the past few months about their exploits. Since I’m filled with the derby spirit, I thought I’d share a few of them this month.
Rich Hall recognized himself on page 248 of The Big One as the unnamed winner of the first and only “Lev’s Derby” in 2007. Rich caught a little albie and won $5.
And yet he sounded as excited about that victory as the much more momentous one he sealed a year before with another albie caught from the same jetty. Rich was fishing the Menemsha side of the inlet on the first morning of the 2006 derby when a fish hit a Deadly Dick and took off into the harbor. Rich had brand-new gear, and he needed it: the fish quickly smoked 150 yards of line off the reel. A sailboat gave him a scare when it cruised through the inlet and right over the line. But the vessel passed and Rich still had his fish. He muscled it up to the rocks only to watch the line part. Somehow he managed to grab it by the tail and hoist it up.
A fellow derbyite named Scott, a cigar-smoking New York City cop with a mohawk, looked over Rich’s shoulder at the fish.
“That thing is comically large!” he said.
Rich needed to get to the weigh station before it closed at 10 a.m., or else wait another 10 hours, his fish losing ounces by the minute. He floored it toward Edgartown, passing a couple of tour buses in his haste. He made it in time and celebrated when the fish weighed in at 14.63 pounds to take over first place. It stayed there for 35 days. Nobody came within a pound and a half of that beast, and Rich Hall was a derby champ.
He didn’t win the grand-prize Boston Whaler, but he did get his name on the list of winners that goes back 60-odd years. He’s got bragging rights on the Menemsha jetty for the rest of his life.
Post-script: All fishermen lie, but you’d think Rich would have no need to exaggerate his fish tale. And yet he still subconsciously enhanced his victory when he first wrote me. He had the fish at 15.63 pounds. “Correction,” he wrote the next day. “It was a 14.63 albie. I added a pound during the years and am believing my own B.S.”
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