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Feature article
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Fish story of the year: Overboard for a brown
By George Thwaites
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You can expect to regularly encounter fishing boats on all of the lakes in Northeast Tennessee. But Watauga Lake is where you’re most likely to encounter a sailboat.
One reason is that the extraordinarily steep banks and deep water of Watauga provide plenty of room to accommodate a keel. The lake also boasts the most consistent winds of any lake in the region. Annapolis, Maryland it ain’t. But for the landlocked sailors of the Tri-Cities, Watauga Lake is a little slice of heaven.
Robert Banks, who once upon a time was a reporter for the Kingsport Times-News, has been an avid sailor since he was 14 years old. These days he’s the skipper of the “Susan Bee” a 28-foot Hunter that serves as a comfortable weekend getaway as well as a racing platform in Watauga Lake Sailing Club events.
Banks’ wife is named “Susan,” by the way. Is he a smart guy, or what?
Banks has been a renaissance man in terms of outdoor recreation — he’s been a bird hunter, backpacker, skier, paddler and even an ultralight aircraft pilot. He’s always been a semi-serious angler — although not in conjunction with sailing. Operating a sailing craft is plenty challenging in its own right.
“I love to fish. And if I go fishing, that’s what my primary focus is going to be. Out in a sailboat, my main focus is sailing,” said Banks, who is a material handling equipment sales engineer for The Bailey Company.
“It's hard to maneuver a fishing rod with all those shrouds and stays and masts and not much flat area to work on. There’s not much room to swing a pole.”
Even so, he’s always been in the habit of keeping a light tackle combo on his cruising boats. Banks noted that it isn’t unusual for sailors to casually wet a line for panfish when boats are anchored in a protected cove for the night. Some Watauga Lake Sailing Club outings have featured informal angling tournaments, including comical “reverse tournaments” where the smallest fish wins.
In recent years, Banks began to wonder if there might be a way to combine his serious interest in sailing with efforts at catching more serious fish. The winds on Watauga don’t reach screaming intensity 100 percent of the time. Sometimes, things are downright docile.
“You always have this picture in your mind’s eye of a boat heeled over about 30 degrees. The crew is up on the windward rail. The skipper has his hand on the tiller and this thing is just carving a trough through the water with the spray flying,” Banks said. “You know, that’s just wonderful when that happens. But you also spend a lot of time going two miles an hour.”
Banks had observed that dedicated anglers trolling Watauga’s deep waters also seemed to be barely moving. The main difference was that they were under outboard power. It seemed mainly a matter of having the correct tackle to get a lure to the depths big trout inhabit.
After doing his research, this past summer Banks bought an Eagle Claw trolling rod with a Penn level-wind trolling reel spooled with leadcore line. He bought an assortment of leaders, swivels and spoons. And he obtained a rod holder that he mounted on his stern rail.
On six different sailing trips, Banks experimented with his new trolling rig but failed to connect with a fish. Finally, on a Sept. 4 weekend sailing outing with his wife, his humble effort to make efficient use of slow sailing time resulted in a terrific fishing story.
“My wife and I had spent the night on the lake. We got up early Saturday morning and it was a beautiful day. The wind was blowing 15 knots — that’s 18 to 19 miles per hour. We spent two or three hours doing some he-man, hairy-chested sailing. It was an awful lot of fun,” Banks said.
“By one o'clock, the wind was pretty much gone. We were able to walk away from the wheel … move around the boat. Have lunch in the cockpit. Conditions were perfect for my trolling rig.”
He’d been quietly dragging a spoon through deep water for about an hour when his wife called his attention to the rod holder.
“I looked back and the rod was doubled over. Something serious was on the other end of that. My first thought was that I'd hit bottom and I looked at my depth sounder and saw I was in 238 feet of water. I set the hook and when I pulled, it pulled back. There was definitely a nice fish on that line,” he said.
The couple “let the sheets fly” (loosened the lines) so the sails would luff and slow the boat’s forward motion as much as possible. After a lengthy fight, the fish was finally brought close enough for Banks to recognize it as the largest brown trout he’d ever hooked in his life.
At this point he realized he’d neglected one important piece of angling equipment: a landing net.
“I climbed over the back of the boat and tried to lift him out of the water by the lure and with one finger in his gills. A brown trout has a mouthful of teeth …you don’t want to stick your thumb in there. About the time I got him chest high out of the water he flipped and came off the hook and I dropped him in the lake. He was gone,” Banks said.
He was upset, to say the least. But just as Banks was about to give himself over entirely to the anguish of losing his magnificent fish, Susan directed his attention to a spot in the water behind the boat. The exhausted trout — which had evidently not recovered from the pressure-change wrought from being pulled from the depths — was still floating on the surface.
“So I did the only thing I could do. I jumped overboard,” said Banks.
Susan wasn’t entirely happy with his decision. The boat, of course, was still moving. And it was the first time she had been left entirely in charge of it. Single-handing any sailboat for the first time is by no means as easy as falling off a log. The whole point of sailing is that you don’t just “point it and go.”
“The first attempt I made to grab the fish, he swam away from me. I got my hands on him and he went down. I’d lost him. While I was treading water in the middle of the lake, Susan managed to get the boat turned around and was sailing it back to me,” said Banks.
“I looked down and here the fish came floating back up to me. The second time he came up, I grabbed him with both hands, bit his ear, wrapped both legs around him. You know what I mean. I wasn’t going to let go again.”
Needless to say, this is not a catch-and-release story. The next afternoon at Lakeshore Marina, they baked the fish on the grill with fresh vegetables. They fed seven sailors Sunday dinner with that trout.
Banks wouldn’t be surprised to see more trolling rod holders showing up on the stern rails of Watauga Lake sailing vessels.
“There’s definitely more interest in it, now that people have seen that it will work. The theory is sound,” he said. “I don’t think you’re ever going to have people calling you up saying, ‘Hey, let’s go fishing in the sailboat.’ They’re still out there to go sailing. But if you can combine the two … I think that’s pretty fun.”
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George Thwaites is a sports and outdoors Writer for the Kingsport Times-News. E-mail him at gthwaites@timesnews.net
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