Cocoa Beach & Merritt Island

August 9th, 2008

Tournament Fishing With Kids

Lookin' for a Mogan

A mogan is a word coined by Capt. Blair Wiggins and his TV show producer Kevin McCabe. It is a combination of the words Monster and Bigan', both referring to big fish. This past weekend was spent at the seventh annual Mogan Mania event hosted by Blair and the Additive Fishing TV family.

Capt. Blair and crew puts on this shindig every year for his faithful fans. It is sort of run like a family reunion with covered dish dinner and a "just for fun" fishing tournament. I took my grandson, Robert, so he could fish in the tournament. (You can find our more at www.addictivefishing.com )

Robert and I chose to do our fishing in the Atlantic. The seas were calm at 1 to 2 feet and a light breeze made Saturday a perfect fishing day. We headed out early to the Bull Shark Barge, Southeast of the St. Lucie Inlet. We used sabiki rigs to catch some Spanish sardines for bait and headed out to troll.

The first knock-down was a 24 inch dolphin. The dolphin made a couple of nice jumps before coming to the boat. Since this was only the second dolphin Robert had ever caught, it was and exciting catch.

More trolling and one-half hour later Robert hooded up with another 24 inch fish. This one, however, was a hard-hitting, hard-fighting bonito. The bonito was a first for Robert and he found out just how much of a fight they give you. He finally got the fish to the boat without hollering uncle - but was complaining of sore hands and muscles. A little while later he got another bonito, but having gone to school on the first one he was able to land this one much faster.

After losing 3 or 4 nice mystery fish (we never saw them so don't know what they were) we headed back toward the inlet with time running out on the tournament. We had to be back with photos of our catch by 3:00. As we headed south towards the inlet another knock-down bent the rod double and the drag was screaming. A fish came spiraling out of the water and ripped off some more drag.

The fish turned out to be a 40 inch barracuda and the fight that made the day for Robert. He would get some line in and the fish would take it back. He would get it close to the boat and then lose more line to the stubborn fish. He finally got the cuda boat side and I used a small hand gaff through the lip to bring him on board for a quick picture. We took the pictures and then towed the tired fish along until it revived for a live release.

With that final fish in the boat we headed for the River Palm Cottages, tournament headquarters, to turn in our days catch.

Later that night at the awards banquet I was really proud to see Robert's fish pictures displayed on the PowerPoint presentation that had been prepared. Then, the crowning moment came when Robert's name was called as the winner of the Mini-Mogan Trophy. This was the trophy going to the winning angler in the kids division of the tourney.

Needless to say, the point of all this is - take a kid fishing. They will be the Stewarts of our fishery resource in the future.

That's what it's all about. Good fishin'.