|
|
Bobby Watson has caught
more prize-winning fish and collected more money than anyone during the 12 years the DIFF
Club has sponsored its annual surf-fishing tournament.
Watson has caught 12 fish big enough to win prizes and has gone home with more than $2,300
in prize money.
No one else comes close. Though Gary Bell issecond in the number of prize winners -- 10 --
he has only won $1,000. Carolyn McLamb has caught nine prize-winning fish, but
is second to Watson in cumulative prize winnings -- about $1,800.
Mark Weir, a DIFF Club member, studied 12 years of tournament data for a statistics class
he took last summer. Weir looked at the frequency of prize winners, cumulative winnings
and the size of the winning fish in three major categories -- red drum, bluefish and
flounder.
The results for the frequency of winners and the cumulative winnings are slightly off,
Mark said, because he didn't include minor categories such as croaker and blowfish.
Bubba Johnson is fourth in the number of prize-winning fish with six. Kenneth Bryant, Dick
Gray and Mike Mathews have each won five times. Bob Bryant, Skippy McLamb, Marvin Renfrow,
Woody Rowell, Harold Smith and Hermon Vick have each won four times.
Fourteen club members have won three prizes in the tournament. Thirty-one have won two
prizes, and 52 have won at least one time.
Bob Bryant, Johnson, Steve Barringer and Kevin Davis follow Watson and Carolyn McLamb in
cumulative winnings. They each won about $1,200. Gray, David Kickhan and Billy Walker join
Bell at the $1,000 level.
Aside from looking at the prize winners, |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Weir studied the winning bluefish and flounder from 1991-98.
Data from earlier tournaments were unreliable , he said, because of rule
changes. Weir analyzed drum from the tournament's inception.
The largest winning blues were caught in the early 1990s, when the prize-winning fish all
weighed more than 3 pounds and the largest fish tipped the scale at almost 4 pounds.
Weights of the winning fish plummeted in 1994, when the biggest blue barely broke 2.5
pounds. Sizes have gradually climbed since then.
During the period of Weir's study, the largest winning blue was 3.95 pounds and the
smallest 2.08 pounds. The average weight of a winning fish was 2.92 pounds.
The 5.3-pound flounder that Bob Thompson caught during last year's tournament was the
largest flounder caught in the 8 tournaments that Weir studied. The 1996 tournament
produced the biggest flounders, with the winning fish ranging from just under 3 pounds to
more than 4.75 pounds. There was a big drop in 1997, with no winners topping 3 pounds, but
last year's tournament rivals the '96 version.
The average winning flounder during the period weighed 2.67 pounds.
Weir said he has the least confidence in the drum figures because winners are determined
by length and girth, not weight, which he had to estimate. How the winners were measured
also changed over the years.
That said, the largest drum were caught in 1988, with the biggest fish topping 45 pounds.
The last four tournaments produced the smallest drum, mirroring a decline in the
population. Because of the problems he had in figuring the weights of winning drum, Weir
didn't determine the average size of the winning fish.
For the first time in DIFF Club history, |
|
|
|
|
|
|