Derby fanatic Keith McArt told his pregnant wife to have an open mind.
Yes, the baby’s due date is Oct. 1, smack in the middle of the 2009 tournament. Yes, trying to catch another championship fish would mean putting the Vineyard Sound between husband and wife/baby if and when the water broke or the contractions came.
But he’d make arrangements. Bring along extra cell phone batteries. Call once or twice a day. Leave a list of his friends’ phone numbers in case she couldn’t reach him. Tell his friends where he’d be at all times. Keep the Cape Air and steamship schedules with him. Arrange for a tackle shop owner to ferry him across if all else failed.
And thus, in a feat of derby daring and marital maneuvering, he got a green light to fish the derby — if only for a week instead of four.
“Considering I had to cram a month’s worth of derby into one week, I hit it pretty hard,” he told me today, back on the mainland.
He paused, then laughed.
Pretty hard means maniacal to fishermen like Keith. You and I get eight hours of sleep a night. He got maybe eight hours of sleep the entire week. That’s how you win the shore grand slam — heaviest combined weight of the four derby fish — not once but twice.
The bass fishing was decent enough: He must have caught 100 stripers, but the guy who won the 2004 derby with a 42-pound bass couldn’t catch one bigger than 35 inches this year. Late in the week he heard of a mess of bonito being caught up-island, but before he could get down there his Jeep broke down. A few friends helped him keep his line in the water while he waited for a new starter. On Friday, he paused long enough to swap in the part, then kept fishing.
At 2:30 Saturday morning he drove out to his planned morning fishing spot. He slept in the truck for a couple of hours. By 5:45 he was casting for albies and bonito with a 20 mph wind in his face. A lot of anglers showed up that morning. Word had gotten out about fish caught there earlier in the week. But conditions weren’t ideal, the water dirty and whipped up into whitecaps. Nobody was catching anything and the crowd thinned out.
Keith stuck around and kept working the water, casting continuously even though there were none of the tell-tale breaks of fish.
Then, a hit. The albie slammed his lure right in the trough. Two more cranks and Keith would’ve been lifting it out of the water for another cast. The fish tore out line in a long run. “As soon as I walked up to it I was like Holy smokes!” A few years back he’d seen a fish that size in the weigh station. But this? “I think it looks different when it’s on the end of your line.”
Wilson Kerr, the derby’s publicity whiz, happened to be fishing the same spot that morning, and he offered to weigh the albie on his handheld scale. Keith said he wanted to be surprised at the weigh station — just as he and his wife had decided to wait until the delivery to find out whether they were having a boy or a girl. But he told Wilson he could weigh it as long as he didn’t tell him the result. Wilson took the fish, hooked it up to the Boga grip and returned. He couldn’t tell him how much it weighed, he reported. It had bottomed out the 15-pound scale.
Trouble was, Keith had missed the morning weigh-in and he’d have to wait 10 hours until the evening session. All the while the fish would be losing ounces.
As Keith ran off to get the fish in a cooler filled with ice and seawater, Wilson ran to the top of the dunes to get a cell phone signal. He’d persuaded the derby committee to let him Twitter during the tournament this year. “Estimated 16 pound shore all tackle albie caught this AM!! Missed AM weigh in. Watch the board tonight!!” he tweeted. With that, Keith’s was probably the first leaderboard fish to hit Twitter before it hit the scale.
A crowd showed up in Edgartown to see the fish go on the scale. At 16.55 pounds, it ranked among the heaviest albies caught from shore in derby history.
So now Keith settles in for the interminable wait for 10 p.m. on Oct. 17, when the derby ends. If it holds up, it would be his sixth top-three finish in the past seven years. “I think the baby will distract me,” he said hopefully. He’s hoping to have a reason to come back for the awards ceremony, in which case he plans to bring the newborn and, like any proud papa would, slap it up on the fish scale for a photo. In the meantime, he’s rooting for a big storm to push the albies offshore, and for more reports like his friend’s on Facebook: Fishing is slow, albies are scarce.
“That’s what I like to hear,” he said. “Slow fishing, and maybe throw a hurricane in there.”
(Thanks to the Domurats for the photograph. Ron Domurat is the other half of Team McRat, currently leading the derby team race.)
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