Entry 81-4

Why Shaw Grigsby Likes Bleeding Baits

My Most Disastrous TV Trip And My Luckiest

Editor's Note: Shaw Grigsby, a 47-year-old angler from Gainesville, Florida, has earned $1,194,655 on the BASS circuit, has had 43 top-10 finishes, has made 10 Bassmaster Classic appearances and has won eight Bassmaster tournaments. Grigsby also has a TV show titled "One More Cast" on the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) that airs from January through December on Saturdays at 9:00 a.m. and appears again two more times during the week.

Grigsby:I guess the worst trip we ever had was the sailfish trip where both my cameramen got sick, and both boats we were using for fishing broke down. We were delayed for four days before we could get even one day of fishing. Next to the miserable sailfish trip, the three-year tarpon trip will be one I'll remember for many, many years. Not only did it take us three years to catch a tarpon on a fly rod, but I never will forget the morning we finally caught a great fish that did everything we could want a tarpon to do to make a terrific show. However, we didn't get the show. We had a beautiful sunrise, and my cameraman was filming the sunrise when a tarpon attacked my fly and went nuts. He jumped seven or eight times within 20 yards of the boat, and my cameraman was right on him. I just knew this show would be a dream show. The tarpon put on a show in the air that would stop your heart before finally settling down to a tug-of-war battle.

I suggested we take a break and talk about what we wanted to teach in this show. While fighting the tarpon, I'd talked about how to set the hook, how to fight the fish, how to clear your line and all the other aspects of fly-fishing for tarpon. When the cameraman pushed the button to stop the camera, instead of stopping the camera, he saw that he turned the camera on, and he'd missed all the action of the tarpon jumping. When he turned away from the sunrise to start filming the fish, he hit the button that turns the camera off. So we had no footage of the tarpon battle, and I finally lost the fish.

The next day we went out, and I caught another tarpon. But instead of jumping, this tarpon ran for about 250 yards before he jumped. The cameraman was on him, but the fish looked like a pencil dot on a white sheet of paper because it was so far away from the boat. On the way back in to the marina, we ran out of gas 12 miles from it. The water was really rough, and we had no footage. Fortunately, we had a second boat, which was a little aluminum boat, with us where my producer was. We siphoned most of the gas from his boat into our boat so we could get to the marina. Once we got to the dock, the producer was nowhere in sight. So we gassed up again, went to look for him and found him stranded and out of gas out near one of the channel markers. Then the third year, we did get the tarpon show.

One of the wildest shows we ever filmed, was off of Islamorada in the Florida Keys. We went out to the Islamorada Hump, which is an underwater mountain where the depth of water goes from about 500 feet to 278 feet of water, to try and catch amberjack. Our underwater cameraman was a platinum diver and shark expert who had filmed shark shows for the Discovery Channel. He'd been scuba diving all his life and was one of the elite divers in the world. The captain of the boat didn't know we planned to film underwater, so when our underwater cameraman suited up and flipped over the side of the boat, the captain looked back and saw him go overboard and yelled back to us, 'What's that guy doing?" I told the captain that our diver was going to film the amberjack that we caught coming up from the bottom. The captain screamed, "No, no, no. Get him up. Half of the fish we catch out here are eaten by sharks before they get to the boat. You have to get the diver up." I explained to the captain that we didn't have two-way communication with the diver once he left the boat, so there was no way we could get him back to the surface. Then captain told us, "We have great white sharks out here, huge hammerhead sharks and unbelievably big tiger sharks." When I told the captain that our diver was a shark expert, he said, "Yes, but neither you nor the diver understands how bad, how big and how many sharks are out here."

After a little while, the cameraman came up. We reviewed the film, and the cameraman didn't like what he'd seen. He had gone down to 110 feet and filmed the amberjack all the way up to the boat, but he said there were too many bubbles in the footage. He told me, "I'm going back down. We're going to catch another fish, and this time I'll shoot better footage." So, I baited up again, dropped the line down and hooked up another big amberjack in about 200 feet of water. The captain screamed, "Hey, your diver was lucky last time. Don't let him go back down again." But by that time the cameraman was overboard. When he came up from the second dive, we reviewed the footage, and sure enough, he had some great footage. Not only did he get footage of the amberjack, but he also filmed some blackfin tuna and some dolphin. We got our amberjack show and the underwater footage, and the diver went down and back without getting eaten by a shark. So we figured we were in good shape.

On the way back to the marina, we spotted a big school of king mackerel above an underwater wreck. These fish were breaking the surface, chasing baitfish and putting on a spectacular show. So, just for fun, we stopped and started casting to the king mackerel. My fishing partner and I both hooked big king mackerel that were stripping line off our reel and causing the reels to drag and whine like a cat whose tail was caught under a rocking chair. Our scuba diver decided this was a great opportunity to get some underwater footage of king mackerel. He grabbed his mask and snorkel (no tank), put on his swim fins and flipped over the side of the boat to go shoot the underwater action of us catching these king mackerel. Suddenly our underwater cameraman exploded to the surface and practically walked on top of the water. Just as he got to the boat and jumped onto the dive platform on the back of the boat, he screamed, "Hammerheads!" The instant he screamed he pulled his swim fin out of the water, and we saw 20 gigantic hammerheads. They immediately started hitting the side of the boat trying to get our diver, who was less than one second from being a huge top-water strike. If the boat had been any further away from him, those hammerheads would have had our diver for lunch. When he got on the deck, he explained, "While I was filming the king mackerel, I got this eerie feeling. When I looked around, I saw all these hammerheads that weren't circling but rather were posturing to attack. I was really lucky to get out of the water ahead of them."

My Luckiest Day Of Filming

I was filming a crappie show at Bienville Plantation in Florida where we caught some really big crappie that would weigh from 1- to 1-3/4-pound each on small crappie tubes and 4-pound-test line. Occasionally we would catch a catfish. I was working my tube jig through the brush down on the bottom on my 4-pound-test line when I got a bite and set the hook. The rod bent down heavily. I told my cameraman, "Don't even film this, because this is another catfish, and we're doing a crappie show." We started following this big catfish around with the boat to try to keep the fish from breaking this 4-pound test line when suddenly what I thought was a catfish came to the surface that actually was a 9-1/2-pound bass. Thankfully, my cameraman didn't listen to me and had kept the camera rolling while that bass pulled us all over the lake. After quite a long fight we finally landed the bass on 4-pound-test line. That had to be one of the luckiest days I ever had out filming. I was so glad my cameraman didn't listen to me, because we got every bit of footage from the time I set the hook until I landed that big old bass.

Me And Kevin Vandam

Another great trip was when Kevin VanDam and I went to Mexico. Kevin caught a bass that weighed over 7 pounds, one 8-pounder, one 9-pounder and another that weighed over 10 pounds, all in one day. That same day, I caught a bass that weighed more than 8 pounds and an 11-pounder and countless numbers of 4-, 5- and 6-pound bass that we released. But the most-special part of the day we didn't include in the TV show. We did a show on Carolina rigging for bass on this same trip.

You may or may not know that Kevin VanDam is a rapid-fire fisherman, who fishes fast, covers a lot of water and catches a lot of big bass. The two most-miserable ways for Kevin to fish are with a live shiner on a cane pole or a Carolina-rigged worm. I could tell that Kevin felt tortured having to fish this Carolina rig for these bass, but he was a trooper and a professional and willingly did whatever he had to do to help a buddy like me get a TV show. After we'd both caught some great fish, Kevin began to ask, "Haven't we caught enough for the TV show?" Finally, at 5:00 p.m., I told Kevin, "Okay, we've caught enough fish on the Carolina jig to make a good show. Now you can fish the way you want to, and we'll go have fun bass fishing this last hour before dark."

I asked my cameraman to keep filming even though we didn't plan to use this footage for my TV show. Kevin and I started catching a lot of big bass. We both picked up our Strike King spinner baits and just wore those big Mexican black bass out. When Kevin missed a strike on his spinner bait, I'd cast to the spot where he missed the bass and catch the bass. Both of loved to compete, so even when we fished for fun, we competed. This day, I caught nine bass and Kevin caught eight. As the day was almost over, I cast way back up in a slough near a bush, and a big bass boiled on my bait. I jerked so hard that the spinner bait came flying through the air past Kevin. But before the bait could get to the other side of the boat in the air, Kevin already had made a cast to the spot where I'd missed the bass. And, he caught the bass. So we finished that last hour of fishing tied at nine bass each. Competing with Kevin, one on one, just as two fishing buddies, with no prizes, no TV show, and no one waiting to meet us on the dock, was one of the best days of fishing I'd had in a long time.




 

© 1996-2008 Strike King Lure Company