Ed at the Crappie Masters on the Alabama River - part 1

All I can say is Awesome, awesome, awesome. I was invited down to the Crappie Masters Tournament being held down on the Alabama River in the town of Millbrook (a wonderful town that put in lot of hard work to have us there) . You have to realize, I've never been to a single professional fishing tournament, none, no Crappie Tournaments, no Bass Tournaments. I've never attended a single weigh in. What I'm used to are informal crappie.com gatherings with a big fish pot that you can join into, or not. So I knew it was going to be interesting, but never knew just how much fun it would be.
The first surprise was the fact that I was being treated like a writer. I'm not a writer, I own crappie.com and I happen to publish some of my experiences online every now and then. Who knows, now that I have more time to fish, I suppose you'll be seeing a lot more of my stories online. I'll call them stories, as I have no professional writing experience, but I do enjoy writing about my time spent fishing.

Well, my second surprise was going out with Paul Alpers fishing. Paul runs the Crappie Masters Tournaments and has his own TV show. And the excitement started right off the bat as we sped down the river at 71 or 72 miles per hour. You can look at the speedometer and judge for yourself how fast we were going. All I know is that it was darn cold out there, and I could barely breath at that speed looking into the wind. I had fun on the ride, I don't regret going for one second, but I just wish Paul woulda slowed down for some of them logs I seen floating in the river. He just steered around them and kept going. He certainly seems to know what he's doing.


It was early Spring and the water was just starting to warm up for the spawn. We really could not figure out if the spawn was on yet or not. The water lever was extremely high, and right when we were there for the tournament it was dropping, and dropping fast. We spider rigged in the shallows of a creek and had lots of fun catching fish. We only caught one nice 2 pound Crappie, but also we caught Gar, Catfish and Drum as well, which kept it exciting.
And now here's the story about the 2 pound Crappie that Paul actually mentioned twice during the course of the event. He made some tongue in cheek fun of me not being able to catch fish. He told his audience I can catch them, but I can't put them into the boat. Well, I caught the fish on my rod, but Paul grabbed my pole to lift it into the boat for me. In all the excitement, with a 14 foot rod, spider rigging in 3-4 feet of water, with no net handy, I had a hard time. Go figure! With 3 feet of line hanging off the end of a 14 foot pole, how do you swing that guy in the boat! Well Pauls answer was to just let that pole bend back down to you and grab the fish. Too funny, but we did get that nice 3 pounder in the boat.
The second day was just as exciting. Since I was was a media man now, I was invited to go out fishing in the media day event with Jim and Barbara Reedy. We met up at the Bass Pro Shop in Prattville Alabama, and from there we went to the Alabama River. We launched out of Swift Creek. Quite a busy launch ramp, but everyone is in and out lickity split. They don't waist a lot of time, everyone is ready to go in before they arrive ramp side, and when they pull out, they power up onto the trailer in no time. I was impressed. Usually I'm fussing with something and taking a lot longer.
Anyway, Jim and Barbara were the nicest people you would ever meet. We sat in the boat while Barbara backed the boat and trailer down and put us in the water. Barbara parked the trailer and hopped into the boat. Like I said, we were in the water in no time.
We tried a couple spots. Jim had his eye on one spot but there was another boat sitting there. We fished nearby not catching anything. As we approached this other fisherman, he recognized Jim's “wrapped” boat and started talking to us. He turned out to be the most polite and nicest fisherman I'd ever encountered on the water. He spoke, saying “Yes sir Mr. Reedy”, telling Jim how he had been doing fishing, they discussed different spots for maybe 15 minutes. Then the gentleman said, here Mr. Reedy, I'll move out of here so you can fish this spot right. I could not get over the fact that they had never really met before, and this guy was just so gracious, even giving up his fishing spot so we could see if the fish would bite for us while spider rigging.
After all that, it turns out we did not get any bites. We went to a couple other spots, tried to pitch to the shallows, and still nothing. On the way back, Paul Alpers caught us in a channel with the camera crew and interviews Jim and Barbara. Paul even asked me a question, I forgot what about, but watch his show, maybe you'll even see me TV, you never know.
I figure I'd get this published now. I'll post a part 2 shortly (once I write it).