Gerard Elias of Team Hobie casts to win Kayak Bass Fishing National Championships - Barnstable Patriot

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Gerard Elias of Team Hobie casts to win Kayak Bass Fishing National Championships - Barnstable Patriot Posted: 12 Mar 2020 07:59 AM PDT "I'll give you a call when I get back after winning the tournament," says Gerard Elias. He's talking about the Kayak Bass Fishing National Championships, coming up April 2-4 at Lake Guntersville in Monroe County, AL. At stake? $75,000 for first place with various add-ons and bonuses pushing total payouts north of $100,000. That's serious money. By comparison, the more established B.A.S.S. Masters event pays $300,000 to the champion. (In other sports, a baseball player on a World Series winning team gets about a $400,000 bonus; a Super Bowl winner, about $100,000). But this event is kayaks only. Elias is a Sea Sports ambassador for Team Hobie. Located in Hyannis, Sea Sports has long sold Hobie stand-up paddle boards and recently moved into kayak fishing as well. Owner Jeff Craddock of Marstons Mills already sponsors a Sea Sports cycling team. He said when it came time to start a competitive fishing team, Elias was easy to work with and "seemed like a good fit." Elias says the Hyannis shop has been "terrific, they were very open to the idea of developing a [fishing] team." The nationals is an event huge in scope, with over 800 competitors from all over the country, and huge in scale, too, with 69 miles of water spread over something like 70,000 acres, with various bass in pre-spawn, spawn and post-spawn modes. They're going for freshwater black bass, more commonly called largemouth. The Massachusetts largemouth record is over 15-pounds, set back in 1975. For two days, competitors will duke it out for biggest bass, and by Saturday, only the top 100 anglers are allowed on the lake. These are your finalists. Elias hopes to be among them. He'll be competing in the flagship of the Hobie line, which he calls "the Cadillac of kayaks," the Pro Angler 12.360 model, loaned to him for the season by Sea Sports. I've seen this craft. It doesn't really look like a kayak; it looks more like a small aircraft carrier. It's gray and camo-color, blunt bowed with a raised seat; it bristles with armaments. It's got handles everywhere – rod holders, tilt up tackle boxes, a live well and features Hobie's patented Mirage Drive 360 self-propulsion. At $4,500 retail, it costs more than the used cars that many of us drive. LOOK ALIVE! With upwards of $100,00 on the line (pun intended), organizers are on the lookout for any number of hi-jinks. KBF judges at the nationals will accept photos of released fish, but fish must "look alive." Seems important. It goes on to state that fish will be denied if said fish "appears to be dead, mutilated, frozen, or otherwise damage (sic), or it appears to have been mashed, mauled or otherwise mutilated." (A good rule of thumb is that if something is listed in the rules, some joker tried to get away with it before, but really, who exactly is bringing frozen, mauled, mashed and otherwise mutilated fish to a weigh in? And really, mashed? Who does this?) Indeed, there are 31 separate reasons a fish's photo can be denied, not excluding if the left eye is covered in the photo! From shouting matches over disputed fishing holes to outright larceny, bass cheating has a long history. In the 1980s, there was a loosely organized criminal ring that specialized in winning almost every contest in the south. Their competitive advantage? Taking huge bass from Florida and driving them to tournament sights in Louisiana and Texas, where bass are genetically smaller. The money was good enough that some guys installed aerated tanks in their pickups to get the stolen bass there alive. Elsewhere, one guy even robbed an aquarium to get a big fish! There are any number of tricks cheaters will attempt: the "caged fish," where the unscrupulous bring huge fish to the event and keep them alive in cages under a hidden spot; the "lake switch," where you fish out of bounds; and the "shop and chop," where an angler sells his whopper bass to a tournament competitor in exchange for a portion of the prize money. It's serious business—in 2018 at Lake Guntersille, sight of this year's KBF nationals, two men were caught with caged fish and they spent a month in jail. MASS BASS TO THE NATIONALS Elias qualified during a season-long tournament series here run by the Massachusetts Kayak Bass Fishing Association. He started seriously kayak fishing about three years ago but says he's been fishing his whole life. Now closing in on 70, he says he most enjoys "the solitude, being by yourself. I can get into places bigger boats can't." He says the kayak also allows him to sneak up on wildlife that might otherwise get spooked by a noisy motor. There are events all over New England, with the Osterville Rotary's annual Bluefish tournament at the Wianno Club scheduled for July 11, and Mashpee-Wakeby scheduled for October. Score enough points in the regional events, and you can qualify for nationals. Elias hopes to do well. He's heading down with a kayak on a trailer and dreams in his heart. Here on the Cape, the West Harwich resident enjoys fishing Lake Wequaquet in Hyannis, which he enjoys for being one of the few places to hold pike, as well as at least two other lakes he'd prefer I didn't mention in print. He'll trailer the fishing rig and join a few other members of the New England contingent for a few days of pre-tournment fishing and scouting work. He's already done some scouting of the lake, "even though I'm 1,000 miles away," thanks to Google Earth and similar apps and thinks he may have isolated a few areas likely to hold big bass. With the help of Sea Sports and some luck, Gerard Elias hopes to bring a national championship back to the Cape.

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