TAILWALKER
Sportfishing
at its Best in the Fabulous Florida Keys
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TAILWALKER |
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No off-season for Walker By Cal Sutphin
With the slow tourist season here in the Keys, many local captains look to make ends meet by taking odd jobs like dry walling or painting. Others just pull in their bootstraps and ride it out. Then there's Capt. Scott Walker on Duck Key who runs the aptly named Tailwalker. No rest for the weary, he's a billfish tournament nut. How's this schedule for easing back and re-charging your batteries?
The Sunday following, Walker jumped on the boat to run 150 miles down to North Carolina to fish the Pirates Cove Billfish Tournament, a four-day event. Immediately following that, it was the Mid-Atlantic $500,000 Billfish Tournament in Cape May, N.J. How's that for being the off-season?
At the White Marlin Open - which Walker has rarely missed since 1978 - he has seen top mate honors twice while fishing with his aunt and uncle, and was captain of the year in 1992. Walker started as a captain out of Ocean City at age 18. He started vacationing to Duck Key in the mid-'70s and moved down full time in 1983 after graduating from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. He immediately started working as a mate on his aunt and uncle Katie and Fred Riffe's charter boat the Huntress out of Duck Key.
“We only caught three white marlin and never had any multiple hookups the whole week. We never saw a blue marlin that tournament,” he said. “Fishing was very slow for the 400 boats fishing, for the most part, and the boat with the most releases with eight was a boat I used to take care of called the Billfisher. It just was not a good showing for us.” At the Pirate's Cove, Walker admits to still trying to get the boat “dialed in,” which is slang for making the boat attract fish. “The Open was so slow, we really wanted to blame not seeing fish on the boat, but we did not have any spare propellers to change out to help with the acoustics. We tried faster, slower, everything,” he said. “We went to Pirates Cove and stopped using trolling valves and used just our regular engines that week. We had slightly better results with the white marlin, although we were virtually out of contention the final fishing day and needed a large blue marlin to get back in the hunt. I don't write anything down and just remembered hearing on the VHF that every blue marlin bite for the week seemed to be in an area about 50 miles away.” He continues, “We were just pulling big marlin baits and missed a white and a sail early in the day. A friend of mine working the same path an hour later hooked a blue that weighed in at 650 pounds. A boat that was right in front of us hooked up a blue that eventually weighed in at 770 pounds. Finally, two hours later, we had our blue on that was roughly 450 pounds, too small to meet the 500-pound minimum for bringing in to the weigh station, but at least I felt like we finally had the boat dialed in.” Now to the Mid-Atlantic $500,000 the following week. Here's how Walker remembers it: “We started slow again with just one release white the first day. Bad weather moved in so we took the next two days off and then the field split. There was a batch of fish about 110 miles off of New Jersey and a batch 105 miles off of Virginia. We rolled the dice and ran to N.J. “The water was beautiful and [we] managed to see about 30 fish but only managed one for the tournament. Every turn I made was the wrong turn. By the way, the boats that went to Virginia, the same area we had just fished the week prior, ended up tearing up the marlin. It was a very frustrating summer for us.” He plans to step up his tournament presence at the Turks & Caicos in the spring.
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