I’ve always wanted to visit Las Vegas, but never thought it would be to compete in a spearfishing contest. Thanks to Mike McGuire I was able to visit Vegas and experience some fresh water spearfishing. The trip for team Guam was about as last minute as you can get. We missed most of the deals because we were not sure we could put a team together in time. But we did manage to reserve the last rental boat for the comp. Our plan B was to rent out a house boat for the competition. We wouldn’t have gotten very far very fast but at least we could have eaten breakfast on the way out and nap between dives 🙂 We Arrived in Vegas on May 16th so we had a day and a half to scout and we thought we had a good game plan for the first day’s competition which was only shooting striped bass. From our scouting days we thought we were going to catch 15 to 20 stripers easily and that some would be good size. We hadn’t had the chance to get outside the zone to try and shoot any of the fish yet so we found out quickly those striped base look a lot bigger than the actually were. Not to mention They must have gotten the memo about the competition because we were not finding them anywhere. At the end of the first day we were all pretty nervous thinking we will have to catch up on carp day because there was no way the other competitors were having such a hard time finding the Bass. To our surprise everyone had trouble finding the elusive little guys and we were not doing too bad. *YEA FIRST PLACE BY 20% WAS NOT TO BAD—MIKE
Day 2 was like ground hogs day for the bass. It was an hour into the competition before I shot or even saw my first carp. The night before our team was discussing how we were going to unload all our fish from the boat to the truck and now here we are 2 hours in with 4 hours left and myself and my partner had about 5 or 6 carp. It was hard not to panic with visions of us only having to unload a stringer of 15 to 20 fish, because that was the math at this rate. With all the spots we scouted turning up empty we just kept swimming and diving and progressively the fish started showing up more and more. We were nowhere near our expected 100 fish quota that we all heard we needed to compete, but with any luck just maybe the other teams were having the same struggles. While unloading the fish we saw that “the struggle was real” for all the teams and even heard everyone saying today the bass were everywhere but the carp were hiding. There was no way to tell how we did because even though it wasn’t what we were hoping to catch there was still a lot of Carp being hauled off the boats. We were not worried about the results because we had already came out ahead with a great experience and an awesome trip. Not every day do you get the chance to compete with such talented divers and shoot such high numbers of fish. We all had a blast and look forward to the next one.
My hat goes off to Mike McGuire for hosting the event and my friends, team and family for organizing the trip.
