Bob Bramblet The Making of a Champion
Kayak Fishing ClassicS Tournament Trail Magazine Tournament Trail Magazine Kayak Fishing ClassicS
November 2011
Welcome to The ClassicS
Special points of interest: 2011 Tournament Series Year Series Championship National Champion Photo‟s
Inside this issue: Winning is Tough
2
When You Win
2
Should You Fish
2
Series Championship
3
Angler Action Award
3
Action Photo Award
3
For Our Sponsors
4
All of us here at the Kayak Fishing ClassicS wish to welcome all of you to the ClassicS and our new Tournament Trail Magazine. The scope of our magazine is to provide our readers with the latest information about our national tournament series. We conduct 10 open tournaments along the Coastal Gulf States beginning each year in January and finish up in October with our Series Championship. After the regular series year we conclude the year with our invitational national championship in November.
Our contestants earn series points towards receiving an invitation to the national in each of our regular series tournaments. Our sponsors provide fantastic gear prizes to the top five winners at each event. We award nearly
$10,000.00 in Sponsor Gear Prizes at each tournament. Both the Series and National Champions will also receive a fantastic Diablo Paddlesports Kayak in addition to their Sponsor Gear Prizes.
You will see our sponsors products regularly featured in this publication as we try to bring to you new and exciting kayak fishing products that anglers need and value. We test these products before ever inviting a company to become a sponsor, so we know it‟s great Staff Journalist paddling our for gear offered at great first ever Classic. It was a very prices for anglers evecold day. rywhere.
The Great Jon Shein helps staffer launch kayak. We will be hearing form Jon throughout the year.
The Right Stuff Throughout the series year the Tournament Trail Magazine will be bringing you articles about the right gear for life on the tournament trail. We know that the nature of saltwater fishing is very tough on your gear and on you as well.
We will cover the gear and what makes it so good. If we discover some gear that proves to be great and is well suited for your needs we will pursue the company in our efforts to bring you the „Right Stuff.‟ This also goes for our anglers. We will have a sec-
tion dedicated to you in our Angler Health section each month. This will include great ideas and ways to help you stay fit without spending 3 or 4 days at the gym. We will also includes articles by leading doctors that you are sure to want to read.
Kayak Fishing ClassicS Tournament Trail Magazine
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Winning Can be Tough As in any sport, winning takes preparation, planning, execution and in fishing, a little luck.
The ClassicS simply has the best level of completion in both fly fishing and light tackle.
Our anglers know that winning can be tough and consistently winning is even harder especially when the series features some of the best coastal saltwater anglers around. Anglers from Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Canada compete in the series and they are all after that all important item that drives all tournament anglers everywhere. What drives an angler to compete in a series is that inner need to satisfy the desire of compete. The need for speed, so to speak.
If you place in the Top Five in any given Classic, you have had a very good day. If you win a Classic you have had a great day and you will know it for sure.
target of every angler in the series.
Place in the Top Five a few times and you are now becoming well known in the kayak fishing world. Win a few ClassicS and get on top of the series leader board and you become the
Everyone wants to be on top. Staying there is another story.
What Happens when You Win the last one to know. Sounds odd but that is how the Awards Ceremonies are run.
To begin with, if you win you will be
Each awards presentation will starts by awarding the fifth place winner who is awarded several very nice prizes. The awards progress towards first place and the prizes just keep getting more and more plentiful as do the Series Points. It may look that the prizes will run out before first place is announced
but they just keep on coming and coming. One angler was noticed to say that is looks like a „Kayak Christmas‟ and that‟s a fair assessment to say in a few words. The Kayak Fishing ClassicS works very hard to bring contestants the very best in fishing gear that is of high quality and priced as such that the average angler can afford. In addition to all of the cool gear that the winners are awarded, they also re-
Should You Fish the ClassicS In a word, “You Bet You Should.” Kayak Anglers from all skill levels enter and follow the ClassicS from novice to expert. An interesting thing happens to every contestant regardless of skill level. They all get better with each tournament and by series end they are no longer the same angler that they were when the series began. They must learn to rely on their species knowledge because chances are they are not going to fish at their secret
honey hole in a Classic. New to the series anglers have learned by talking to others in the series and by trying new lures and techniques. As the fishing locations and conditions change along the tournament trail, the anglers are repeatedly faced with new challenges. They also learn a lot on the way. Sure, familiarity and skill go a long way but by series end most anglers can successfully fish in waters that they have never fished before and catch fish.
Species knowledge and knowing how to read the water is what it takes here on a level playing field.
Kayak Fishing ClassicS Tournament Trail Magazine
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Series Championship Classic The Series Championship Classic was to be held on October 8 however Mother Nature decided to become windy… very windy indeed.
storm season as our friend in Orange Beach, Alabama know. The area was scheduled for a Classic tournament last
Sustained winds at 22 knots and with gusts up to 35 knots it is no time to be on the water in a plastic boat. It would be more like Flugtag in Tampa Bay. The tournament has been rescheduled for October 29 just a week before the national championship. You can all thank Mother for that one. We really can‟t complain too much when you consider where and when we fish. Summertime along the Gulf Coast
on the area for three days and the wind howled and blew 3 to 4 inches of wet sand and debris covering the town and making for some very nasty and unsafe conditions. Overall the weather has cooperated with us and we are looking forward to the series championship and the upcoming national championship. Registration has been extended for the Series Championship and it‟s not too late to earn points for an „invite‟ in November.
month and a tropical storm sat on top
See you there and good fishing.
Angler Action Award The ClassicS works with several marine research and conservation organizations to help promote angler awareness and provide the groups with scientific data for their purposes. In mid series the ClassicS and the Angler Action Organization got together to put a unique data collection system into play for the ClassicS
Contestants. Registered anglers can now record their fish data from pre-fishing and tournament days on the Angler Action Org website under the Kayak Fishing ClassicS drop down selection . This will automatically enter them into a special drawing for additional prizes from the series sponsors. Recently the first three winners were all at the last
awards ceremony and were awarded some very cool gear and artwork. Marty Meakin, Derick Burgos and Richard Smith received prizes from AquaBound Paddles, PrecisionPak and Steve Whitlock Game Fish Art. The collected data helps scientists to preserve our coastal fisheries.
Angler Action Photo’s Award Coming to ClassicS in 2012
Action Photo Award This is new for our 2012 Series Year. Anglers may submit their action shots from their tournament prefishing activities or from the actual tournaments. Our anglers see some pretty cool things while on the water and they now have a new way to share them with the our readers. Anglers
can simply submit their photos electronically along with their name and a brief description. One of our staff journalists will interview the angler and submit an article about the catch or sighting. The winning angler will receive a spe-
cial sponsor prize that will be made public when the Angler Action Photo goes live in January of 2012. ClassicS anglers have long wanted something to assist them in getting these kinds of shots and we think we have the solution for them. Watch for the action shots in upcoming issues of Tournament Trail Magazine and we think you will enjoy it.
We hope that you have enjoyed our preview issue of the Kayak Fishing ClassicS Tournament Trail Magazine. The full issue version will begin in January of 2012 with our new series year. Contestants in our series may also submit articles with photos about their fishing adventures in their home waters as well as share their experience in our events. Thank You and Good Fishing.
Visit us on the web at KayakFishingClassicS.com
A Word for Our Sponsors We wish to thank our fantastic sponsors for making the 2011 Kayak Fishing ClassicS Tournament Series possible. Without our sponsors we could not bring a quality series to our anglers along the Coastal Gulf States. Our anglers also wish to thank you for all that you do for the ClassicS and for them. They know that all of you work very hard to provide the ClassicS and ultimately them with the phenomenal products and artwork that you do. On behalf of our anglers and from everyone here at the ClassicS, Thank You Very Much! All of sponsor gear that we award has
been put through some very tough testing by us before we ever extend an invitation to a company to become a sponsor. We do this to assure us that we are awarding products of the highest quality that can stand up to the riggers of a tournament trail in saltwater. When we talk about our sponsors products, it is not to promote them but rather to help you become more informed about what their products can do for you as an angler
The art, well the art that we award speaks for itself, no doubt.