Big Boats, Big Money

Panama City Beach's Bay Point Invitational Billfish Tournament offers big-time excitement for fishermen and spectators alike.

Bruce VanWyngarden     
photography by Courtland William Richards

SweetTea Journal (Summer/Winter 2007) – It's opening night for the 23rd Annual Bay Point Invitational Billfish Tournament in Panama City Beach. The atmosphere ashore is a combination of tailgate party and county fair. The lush resort grounds of the Bay Point Marina are lined with vendor tents selling T-shirts, boat supplies, condos, cheeseburgers, recreational watercraft, time-shares, grilled fish, marine “art” (such as mermaid statues or a glass coffee table with a turtle head poking through it), and beverages—adult and otherwise. Hundreds of people stroll in the evening sun, drinks and food in hand, savoring the strangely appealing aroma of boat fuel, sea air, and funnel cakes. A local music combo begins to play.

Just a few yards from the milling throng, seventy-one towering white fishing boats are lined up at the dock like gently bobbing million-dollar wedding cakes. Here on the boats, it’s a different story. It’s not a party. In fact, there’s a tangible tension in the air, like you find in a locker room an hour before kickoff. Some of the crews are blasting Guns N’ Roses or Tom Petty while they work. Others toil in silence. But all the boats are frenzied anthills of activity as crews prepare for the tournament’s 8:30 p.m. start, stocking food and cases of water, checking reels and line, stowing clothing and gear.

Bobby Sullivan of Panama City slowly paces the rear deck of the Knot Now. Seven red rods jut upright at various angles from behind his boat’s fighting chair, their massive reels spooled with hundreds of yards of line. The drags have been set, the lures packed in tackle boxes, and the frozen bait stacked in the cooler. Below deck, there’s enough food and fuel to allow Sullivan and his eight-man crew to spend the next forty-eight hours at sea. They will fish day and night, crewmen and anglers alternating sleep with hours of watching for anything that might lead them to fish. Big fish.

The money catch at Bay Point is blue marlin. The team landing the biggest marlin this year wins $100,000. (The tournament-record marlin, caught in 2001, weighed 1,046 pounds.) And although billfish—fish such as marlin and sailfish, which have spearlike snouts—are the top prize, teams also are competing for the biggest catch of wahoo, tuna, and dolphin (not the cute Flipper kind of dolphin, but an edible fish known on most restaurant menus as mahimahi). The top prize for those fish is $40,000. Most boats will run offshore from ninety miles to as far as two hundred miles, burning up to 1,700 gallons of fuel at almost $4 a gallon at the time of the tournament. That’s a $6,800 investment just to drive the boat around. This isn’t a tournament for dilettantes or weekend anglers. The crews of these boats aren’t fooling around. Even the entry fee is daunting—more than $24,000 to compete in every category.

“We’ll have seven lines out at all times,” Sullivan says. “We’re fishing for anything that bites. With catch and release, any billfish that meets the minimum size requirement means points. But like everybody else, we’re looking for that big one.”
As you walk the dock, it is the same on every boat. The boat names may sound frivolous—Cat-N-Round, Plumb Crazy, Hello Darlin’, Outta Here, Sea Ya, Tiger Bait—but the preparation is anything but. On the Wishbone, out of Point Clear, Alabama, mate Chuck Eads pulls on a line with a device that measures the reel’s drag setting. Crewman Kevin Rendell looks down from the upper deck, listening for Eads’ reading.

“That’s it,” Eads says, as the reel clicks. “That’s 15.” Eads says they set the drag at 15 percent of line strength. The Wishbone uses one-hundred-pound test line with a four-hundred-pound test leader. They’ve fished this tournament for six years, and they placed in Catch and Release for the first time in 2005. Now they’re hungry for bigger things. As Eads and Rendell move to the next rod, an announcement blares over the dock’s loudspeakers.

Captains and crews are being summoned to the weigh-in area. They leave their boats and gather in a semicircle on dozens of folding chairs, the sun glaring into their eyes. As the tournament director reads the rules, it’s obviously a formality. Everyone here knows the basics of the competition: The minimum-size blue marlin that can be brought in must measure 101 inches from tail to lower jaw (a length Sullivan earlier had estimated would yield a 450-pound fish). Only wahoo, dolphin, and tuna that are more than 20 pounds can be weighed. Billfish shorter than 101 inches must be videotaped and released to earn points.

As the sun falls behind the boats, a local Scottish bagpipes-and-drums outfit marches to the fore and plays “Amazing Grace” for the crowd and the assembled boat crews, bringing an odd moment of poignancy to the affair. Afterward, as the crews scatter to their boats, a radio deejay on a nearby stage introduces the evening’s musical guest. “It’s Billy Joe Royal,” she shouts, to mostly puzzled stares. “Let’s give him a big Panama City welcome!”

Or not, as the crowd seems to decide.

A lanky fellow in a Hawaiian shirt strolls on stage, grabs a guitar, winks at his band, and breaks into the old Chuck Berry tune “Teenage Wedding.” No one seems to know quite what to make of this, and most of the crowd melts back into the docks, VIP tents, and vendor areas. At the end of the song, approximately seventeen people applaud. “Ah,” Royal mutters bemusedly into his mike, “a smattering of applause.”

“Yes,” his drummer agrees, “that was definitely a smattering.”

“ ‘Down in the Boondocks,’ ” shouts an audience member.

“That didn’t take long,” Royal says.

An hour or so later, the rumble of boat motors has begun to pervade the marina, as the captains prepare for launch. At 8:31 p.m., the Bay Point Marina cannon fires a sonic blast that echoes over the water briefly, before being drowned out by the roar of seventy-one very large boats moving out to sea. As they stream away from the marina, jockeying for position, fireworks erupt overhead, powdering the night sky red, green, and gold. It’s a fine sight and a fine send-off. Back at the marina, the party revs up again. Out on the Gulf, the real work begins—if the fish will cooperate.

Friday, July 14
It’s 3:00 a.m., and the Legendary is one hundred miles southwest of Panama City Beach in “the middle of nowhere,” as Captain Rick Koster puts it. They are looking for a weed line he thinks is in the area. The Legendary, like most boats, uses weed lines (water with floating vegetation), riptide lines, and circling birds as indicators of fish. But even with a nearly full moon, such indicators are hard to find at 3:00 a.m. It’s dark out here in the middle of nowhere, but Koster decides to start fishing anyway.

The crew puts out several lines baited with bright plastic teasers and ballyhoo (a frozen live bait), and the Legendary begins trolling the black waves, hoping for lightning to strike in the form of a large blue package with a long, sharp nose. At 6:15 a.m., as the dawn light is creeping into the eastern sky, there is a very special delivery, a blue marlin that attacks one of the baits and takes off for parts deep and unknown, tearing line off the reel, making it scream like a teenage girl at a Justin Timberlake concert.

Boat owner Peter Bos fights the fish for more than an hour, until the crew is able to bring it alongside the Legendary. Once they determine the big blue is longer than 101 inches, it is killed and brought on board. At 113 inches, there is no question the fish is a possible tournament winner, so Koster turns the Legendary north to make the long trip back to shore.

At Bay Point Marina, tournament officials are excited. The word from most of the boats is good, as in “good fishing.” In tournament parlance, they say there is a “bite on.” Boats have been radioing in all day announcing that they are catching fish from all four categories. There is talk of a record wahoo. Only three boats, however, are returning for the optional Friday night weigh-in. The buzz at this point is about the Legendary’s marlin. Over the tournament’s twenty-three years, the winning blue marlin has weighed as much as 1,000 pounds and as little as 213 pounds, with the average winner hitting around 500 pounds. This fish, at 113 inches, will likely hit the 500-pound mark, making it a definite contender for the big money. But will it hold up?

At the weigh-in, the Legendary’s big fish pulls the scales rope to 501.2 pounds. The fish, its weight, and the Legendary’s name are duly mounted on the large leaderboard. Right now, they stand to make $100,000. But out in the Gulf, things are happening that could change that situation dramatically—a fact Bos acknowledges in a post-weigh-in interview.

“I don’t know if that fish will hold up,” he says. “I’m hearing about a lot of fish being caught out there.” Bos and Koster aren’t resting on their laurels. They’re based in Destin (where Bos created a little place called Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort, a 2,400-acre beach-and-bay-front destination just east of Destin), so they know that when the fishing’s good in the Gulf anything can happen. When the Legendary heads back out a couple of hours later, the bite is still on.

Saturday, July 15
The final weigh-in is tonight. By midafternoon, more billfish—and more big fish—have been caught this year than in the previous two years combined. Thanks primarily to a tie-in with a local radio station, word of the spectacular catch seems to have spread to the general public. If Thursday night’s launch festivities were a tailgate party, tonight appears to be more like a Rolling Stones concert. The tournament record attendance of more than 10,000 people also seems likely to fall tonight. Cars are lined up for two miles outside the gates of the Bay Point complex. Security guards are busily checking parking passes and funneling vehicles to grassy areas along the resort’s golf course. At 5:00 p.m., the marina is absolutely jammed with humanity—and the line of cars outside the gates hasn’t shrunk.

The tournament has come a long way from its rather humble beginnings in 1984. That year, it took all the arm-twisting the tournament’s founders could muster to get fifty boats to ante up the $500 entry fee. Now, it’s an invitation-only event with dozens of corporate sponsors. Each year, cash contributions are given out to local organizations, including the Boys & Girls Club, the Junior Museum, the Children’s Home Society, and others. The tournament also is one of nine events making up the World Billfish Series Gulf Coast Division.

Dockside, the vendors are doing land-office business. T-shirts and tournament ball caps are going like $22 hotcakes. Everybody’s got a beverage. The VIP tents are jammed. Clumps of teenagers with cell phones in full text or talk mode roam the premises, giggling and checking each other out. A large group of seniors in standard resort attire—white pants, white shoes, white hair, and pastel shirts—takes in the scene from lawn chairs in the grass behind the bandstand. There are lots of people who look like models—not a hair out of place, tanned and beautiful, and dressed as if they know it. And their girlfriends look pretty good, too.

Out in the harbor several boats idle, waiting for the weigh-in to start. Longtime master of ceremonies and tournament chairman Bill Spann welcomes the crowd over the PA system and announces that many boats will continue to fish until the very last minute, hoping for a late catch that will put them into the money.

He then starts to tease the crowd, working them like, well, a master of ceremonies.

“You know,” Spann begins, “I’ve been around the Bay Point since its inception, and I’m here to tell you we’ve never had a year this good. You’re going to see some fish tonight that you won’t forget.” The crowd murmurs.

“I’m going to tell you right now that we’ve gotten word that the Sea Wolff has landed a 138-inch marlin,” Spann says. Big oohs. “Just to give you an idea … the current leader at 501 pounds, caught by the Legendary, was 113 inches. This fish goes another two feet or more. I think I know about how much this fish is going to weigh, but you can come to your own conclusions.”

“I bet it goes 850,” says a man in the crowd nearby. “More than that,” says another.
No matter what the mystery fish weighs, the Legendary’s place on the leaderboard looks tenuous, at best.

At 6:00 p.m., the first boat, Magic Moments, backs into the weigh-in dock. “This first fish is a good indication of just how good the fishing has been out there,” Spann says. As it is pulled aloft on the scales, the crowd gasps at the fish and cheers. It’s an enormous wahoo—96.5 pounds, the largest of its species ever caught in the tournament’s history. It’s unlikely any wahoo caught today will displace this monster. So rack up $40,000 for angler Mike Cofer and the Magic Moments.

At 7:00 p.m., a live television broadcast of the weigh-in begins, and the show is simultaneously broadcast on a giant screen on the docks.This is a good thing, because the crowd now makes it nearly impossible to move closer to the action.After a number of boats are weighed in, the announcer teases the audience with the Sea Wolff catch again.“She’s lining to go next, folks,” he says.“If you’ll look at the monitor, you’ll see our camera has been able to get a good look at the boat. Folks, look at that tail!”

On the monitor, the Sea Wolff is backing into the dock.Hanging over the boat’s rear transom is an enormous crescent-shaped tail. It takes eight men to get the fish off the boat.They have to first remove the fighting chair from the deck. Spann vamps and works the crowd through two commercial breaks.“It’s coming, folks, and it’ll be worth the wait.”

As the catch is hauled to the weigh stand, the crowd oohs and aahs at what’s being shown on the monitor.This isn’t a fish. It’s a submarine with a bill, a massive gray tube with fins and a four-footwide tail.The crew struggles to pulley the fish upright to the scale’s hanging hook. As they slowly hoist it above the crowd, people literally stare open mouthed. Because the scale is just barely high enough to allow the fish’s length to clear the dock, the weigh-in takes a long time. But the payoff—emotionally for the crowd and financially for the Sea Wolff—is well worth it.The marlin weighs 998 pounds, the second largest ever caught at the Bay Point.

Angler Barry Carr tells the crowd it took him four hours and twenty minutes to land the beast—which is exactly how long it took the Legendary to lose $50,000 (that’s the difference between first and second place). But there’s consolation for Koster and Bos; today one of the Legendary’s anglers landed a tuna large enough to earn third place and $10,000.But who’s counting? It’s easy come, easy go, in the world of big-time fishing. If you have to ask how much it costs to play, you probably can’t afford to do it. But lots of other folks—as evidenced by the line of traffic still outside the gates at 10:30 p.m.—know you can have a great time at the bigtime parties until your ship comes in.