Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Hats off to Optimist's tournament
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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A springtime tradition among Virginia anglers is reaching another milestone.
The annual Smith Mountain Lake fishing tournament sponsored by the Optimist Club of Cave Spring is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
The tournament will run May 2-4 out of Foxport Marina.
Reaching the milestone is prompting a tournament change that's also becoming something of a tradition.
The entry fee is climbing $5 to $40.
"We do that on our anniversary years," said Roanoke's Ike Harris, who's been involved with all 39 tournaments so far. "We went to $25 on our twenty-fifth anniversary, $30 on our thirtieth, and so on."
Ticket sales have been fair, Harris said.
"We've probably sent out 50 or 60," he said. "That's pretty good.
"But you never know what impact gas prices or the economy might have."
The tournament once attracted nearly 2,000 competitors but participation in recent years has held around the 500 mark.
After paying out the prizes, the club typically hauls in about $10,000, with which it funds youth programs in and beyond the Roanoke Valley.
The only other change to the event this year is the renaming of the special trophy awarded to the winner of the smallmouth bass category.
For years the trophy has been named in honor of the late Ozzie Worley, the longtime outdoors writer for the Roanoke World News. This year it becomes the Sonny Lower Memorial Trophy.
"He was a charter member," Harris said of Lower. "He and I were the only ones left and he died last year."
The special kids tournament remains the Bill Cochran Youth Tounament, in honor of the retired Roanoke Times outdoors writer.
The event, for kids whose parents are entered in the tournament, will be on May 3 and offer prizes for the biggest sunfish and carp.
Harris said the club looked into doing something special to celebrate the anniversary but decided against it in part because similar efforts in years past had presented challenges.
"One year we had a tagged fish and that was disastrous," Harris said. "Once we offered free hats to everyone and that was disastrous."
The problem with the free hats idea was the cost of mailing the hats to participants.
The challenge with the tagged fish wasn't so much the cost, as the club obtained an insurance policy to cover the prize should a participant have captured the special fish. The problem was capturing the fish in the first place.
At first the club tried to go through hatcheries to get a fish. But that didn't work.
"Finally, we had to have someone from the club go out and catch one two days before the tournament," Harris said.
The aforementioned insurance policy required that the tagged fish had to have been released a couple of weeks before the tournament. So Harris and other club leaders sweated out the weekend, during which no one turned in the special fish.
As usual, prizes will be awarded for the four biggest fish in six species: largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, crappie, catfish, muskellunge and striper.
Stripers were a new addition last year, replacing walleyes, which are no longer stocked in the lake.
The minimum size for striper entries is 37 inches, which helps protect fish that fall within the protected slot limit in effect at the lake from October through May.
Top prizes are $1,000 in each category, with a $500 bonus for a tournament record.
Some of the tournament records -- such as the 10.33-pound largemouth bass record -- are out of reach, having been set fairly early in the reservoir's life when trophy fishing was at its peak.
The catfish mark of 33.94 pounds is probably the most vulnerable of the records, as the lake produces a fair number bigger cats every year.
Then there's the question of whether or not this is the year someone actually catches a muskie that meets the tournament minimum of 10 pounds. There hasn't been a muskie entry since 1988.
Tickets for the tournament, which much be purchased before 7:30 a.m. on May 2, are available at Roanoke-area bait and tackle stores.
For more information call Harris at 989-8488 or Foxport Marina at 721-2451.
Tri expo at the YMCA
The Roanoke Triathlon Club will host a Spring Triathlon Expo at the Kirk Family YMCA from 7 a.m to noon Saturday.
The free event starts with a 5-mile group run starting at 7 a.m. The YMCA's Pat Bateman will lead a group swim at 8:15 a.m.
From 9 a.m. to noon, vendors will display their wares and offer advice and training tips. A seminar on the region's 2008 race calendar will be held at 9:45 a.m. A Triathlon for Beginners program will be held at 11:30 a.m.
For more information call the YMCA at 342-9622 or visit roanoketri.org.
