The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.4
FIRST, MOST, BIGGEST: A Conversation on Competition
Words: Jason Rolfe and Copi Vojta. Photos: Copi Vojta 2024-06-17 10:09:51
Four folks waist-deep in a fishy spot during the Cheeky Schoolie Tournament. From left to right, anglers Natalie Rhea, Paul Nicoletti, Peter Markano and Rex Messing strip, pause, double-haul and laugh the morning away during the 12th annual rendezvous on Cape Cod.
Fishing tournaments are a funny thing—anathema to some, raison d’être to others. The Flyfish Journal’s editorial crew falls decidedly closer to the anathema end of the spectrum, but after invitations to a couple of tournaments in mid-2023—the Cheeky Schoolie Tournament in Cape Cod and the Schmoots Clooper Invitational carp tournament in eastern Washington state—the two were surprised to find that perhaps they do have a competitive bone somewhere in their bodies (however small). It turns out the sweet smell of victory is varied as a field of wildflowers. In these tournaments participation trophies are the true grand prize. Jason Rolfe and Copi Vojta sat down for a post-piscatorem when the dust had settled in an effort to make sense of this new “competitive” landscape and share a few reflections on the value these events hold for the futures of our fisheries.
Copi Vojta: When I first started flyfishing as a teenager, I had one other friend who also flyfished. We’d get dropped off at a lake by one of our parents and picked up at the end of the day. Usually, things would start with the two of us agreeing on a $5 bet for the first fish, most fish and biggest fish. First, most, biggest. I usually lost, as my friend was a better angler than me, or just luckier. Being out-fished and losing paper-route money sucked, even if in the name of fun.
As I aged out of these friendly bets, I lost any competitive spirit toward fishing I had. Competition and fishing didn’t jive for me. Fast forward 10 years into my shop rat days and I realized organized fishing competitions were a thing. Still not for me, but I was learning about more and more of them, and their popularity. Now it’s come full circle: I’ve been to two fishing “competitions” in the last year—the Cheeky Schoolie Tournament in Cape Cod and the Schmoots Clooper Invitational in eastern Washington—and in spite of myself I had a good time.
Jason Rolfe: It’s funny when you think about it, that urge to turn everything into a competition, instilled in us when we’re very young. There’s probably an evolutionary basis to it, though not being a biologist or sociologist, I wouldn’t know what name to put on the phenomenon.
CV: Yeah, there’s some animalistic urge there for sure. I was involved in team sports prior to learning to flyfish and, perhaps ironically, once I did begin to fish, I pretty much stopped with all of the team sports. I can’t say it was because of the fishing. I was just growing into new things, realizing I enjoyed the solace and mellower times of fishing more than the organized fields of play. It can be a beautiful thing though, knowing your teammates or boatmates well enough to become one thing working together. You’ve told me stories of your bike polo days, traveling the country to compete, and I can’t help but see parallels between those matches and some flyfishing tournaments. Was the result as important as bonding with teammates and peers and meeting other people who shared similar interests and talents?
JR: Bike polo was taken seriously, but it was also a big party. It was something that had a long tradition of competition. It’s hard not to appreciate something like a permit tournament, though—the lengths that angler and guide go to in order to make of themselves a single, tightly controlled organism. I can appreciate the dedication in the same way I can appreciate the dedication of an artist perfecting a line or tennis player dialing their serve. Painstaking comes to mind. Deprivation even. Commitment. It may be one path to enlightenment.
Still, if there is a competitive bone left in my body, it’s most comfortable at the other extreme of “competition,” in something like the Bill Marts’ Schmoots Clooper tourney. You love carping more than just about anyone I know (perhaps excepting Bill). How did it feel to make a competition out of it, so far as you actually did?
CV: I was hesitant to bring any competitive energy back to a day of fishing, but after the first evening’s festivities at the Ala Cozy Hotel in Coulee City, I realized it was just a bunch of like-minded, carp-obsessed anglers getting together with some loose restraints and calling it a “tournament.” It wasn’t about who was going to get the first, most, or biggest, even though there were prizes for two of those categories. Bill just enjoys bringing folks together in the oddest of places to tell fish tales, show slideshows of past excursions, eat good food and go fishing. It didn’t seem competitive—everyone was friendly, forthcoming with information for folks new to carp. People weren’t there just to prove how good a fisher they are, but to connect with old friends and make new ones. Any reservations I had prior to that weekend quickly evaporated in the desert heat. However, the Schmoots Clooper is an individually scored tournament and we fished it together, in your little homemade skiff, and only one of us actually knew how to pole it effectively (not me). So right away I had a bit of an advantage, as I kinda had you as a guide for half the day, poling me around and all.
JR: Yeah, that was fun though. I’d always wanted to try poling someone around in my little boat, and I have to say it was almost as fun watching you nail carp from the platform as it was trying to catch them myself. I wonder, though, how did the vibe differ from the tournament on Cape Cod a few months prior?
CV: Same but different? I was invited to the Cheeky Schoolie Tournament, and I was that guy who’d never caught a striped bass or even fished for them. It was intimidating, mostly due to being in a foreign place surrounded by new people. But I wasn’t competing. I chose to observe instead, and shadowed a few teams, one of which went on to win the thing—the team of Rex Messing and Peter Markano.
The main thing was the difference in size. The Schoolie Tournament is billed as the largest catch-and-release flyfishing tournament in the country, with more than 500 entrants in 2023. The size seemed counterintuitive at first—encouraging so many people to go fishing for striped bass, which have quite the storied past as a gamefish, but also an uncertain future with struggling stocks and management indecision. But as the weekend progressed, I realized it’s much more than “first, most, biggest” and packs a ton of worth for the community.
The great thing about the Schoolie tournament: While it’s a rad community gathering for anglers passionate about striped bass, just as the Schmoots Clooper is for carp, it’s also highly focused on conservation and angler education, championing best practices for catch and release to reduce mortality prior to, during and after the event. Dr. Andy Danylchuk’s team at UMass Amherst is doing some valuable research projects, collecting data on striped bass after they’ve been caught, velcroing releasable anenometers to them, which track speed and movement habits after handling. Sascha Danylchuk’s Keep Fish Wet initiative armed participants with a ton of knowledge about principles anglers can control to be nice to the fish. Over $30,000 was raised to help Keep Fish Wet, Stripers Forever and the American Saltwater Guides Association pursue their missions. That’s significant, and all thanks to the Schoolie tournament.
JR: That’s the great thing about this new generation of “tournaments.” They provide structure for something that is wider-ranging than the bloodbaths of tournaments past. My preference will always be for a solo day on the water, maybe an outing with a friend or two, sans pressure. But I have to admit there is a thrill to adding some constraints and expectations that I think most anglers would enjoy and benefit from. In a tournament, you should be fishing your “best,” and that’s worth something. We don’t scoff at the runner who enters a 5K or marathon, telling them they are doing it wrong; that runner is taking the lessons they’ve learned outside of competition and trying to apply them toward some sort of ideal version of themselves as a runner. The way I see it, a fishing tournament—whether less formal, like the Schmoots Clooper, or slightly more serious, like the Schoolie—can serve the same purpose.
CV: Maybe we can benefit from an external push to fish our best. We all want to catch that first fish, the most fish, the biggest fish, but after all it’s just fishing. In putting ourselves up against a wild creature there are so many variables. And if we’re going to push to fish better, we have to fish better for the fish too, either by joining a community on Cape Cod, or clooping the schmoots in the desert heat of Coulee City. Tournament or not, in my mind it’s best practice to fish hard and do as Todd Snider sings, “Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”
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