Top to Bottom:
Capt. D.M. George,
Jim Jam, 1960.
Capt. Eddy Haneman,
Martha Ellen, 1956.
Bill sh displayed
at the Wrightsville
Municipal Dock.
Postcards courtesy
of Elaine Henson.
44
WBM july 2012
Rob Tennille, Tripp Brice, Kit Taylor — all
those guys are the ones that taught me how to
tie the knots, hook the fish and rig the bait.”
Now there’s a new generation of kids around
the marinas, looking for a ride on the billfishing
boats. Perhaps some of them will return to the
dock one day aboard a boat flying a catch-and-release
flag for each species.
“Every day there are kids around here get-ting
started fishing,” Brice says. “The older guys
are always looking for someone who can come
along and help, and that’s when they start to
learn rigging and tackle. You can tell the ones
who are going to gravitate towards it.”
It’s the excitement of the catch, of hooking a
fish, that draws people in, Tennille says.
“I’ve been out so many days that I had boat
problems, bad weather, all those things,” he
says. “But when the outrigger pin pops, that
moment — it could be a trash bag or grass on
your rig, or it could be the next world record of
some species. That moment, you don’t know. I
still leap from a cooler lid to that rod with the
same enthusiasm … that still gets me.”
It’s a passion that
gets passed down.
Today’s anglers
learned from the
watermen w
of the 60s
and 70s, who learned
in turn from the
early pioneers of
Gulf Stream fishing.