Late night road trip
After dark highways, college bass anglers see the light
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Nick Tate, a college bass angler representing the University of Tennessee, never thought of himself as a collegiate athlete.
Tate also knows what it's like to spend hours upon hours on the highway, how to deal with missing classes and most importantly, how to handle the unexpected.
With the portion of the river off-limits from October 1-15, the majority of the college bass fishing teams drove throughout Monday night to arrive in Little Rock early Tuesday.
Not wanting to miss a second of pre-fishing, most simply planned out their travel so they would arrive at the Arkansas River for open practice.
Drew Frederixon and Jeff Buckingham left Madison, Wis., around 6 p.m. Monday night. The Badger fishing team made good time and arrived in under 12 hours.
"It's our first time here," Frederixon said. "And anything can happen on the river, so we wanted to make sure we got here as soon as we could."
Anglers prepared in advance for classes they'd miss during this week's tournament.
"This is more important than a week of law school," Scott Kehlenbrink of Southern Illinois University said.
"Yeah, and I'm only missing one class all week," teammate Ben Deblois said.
The contingent from Arizona State, Mitch Kistner and Davis Hart, elected to fly on Wednesday. But after the day of travel they experienced, they probably wished they hadn't.
The team was forced to surrender four fishing rods to airline personnel after their rods were deemed too long.
After a bit of haggling, the team had to sprint to catch their plane in Tempe. Once they landed in Houston for the connecting flight up to Little Rock, Kistner and Hart had five minutes to make it to the plane, which was being held for the two anglers.
"Yeah, you could say we're a little tired," Kistner said.
Fortunately for the Sun Devils, they were allowed to bring two break-down rods for the tournament.
Before Wednesday's reception, most teams headed out to get one final chance to formulate their plan for the tournament.
Unfortunately, Chip Porche' and Matt Pangrac of the University of Oklahoma spent it attending to other plans.
"I wasn't paying attention as well as I should have and I ran up on a jetty," Porche' said. "My lower unit was damaged and there were stress fractures in the boat. I just really want to thank St. Ambrose and Illinois for taking the time out of their pre-fishing to help us out."
The Sooners won't quit that easily, however. Porche's father hit the road Wednesday evening to deliver a replacement bay boat.
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