I had volunteered earlier in the week to help out by driving a camera boat for the final two days of this tournament. They gave me the job of following Chuck Economu, who was currently in second place. We launched the boats in Biloxi early in the morning amidst a horde of press and fanfare, but of course had yet another fog delay, and didn’t actually take-off until just before nine o’clock. Once we did though it was quite a ride. Few if any of these top-10 guys were actually fishing in Biloxi, which means that just about everyone made the hazardous boat ride out into the Gulf of Mexico, turned east for 20 miles or so, then up into the mouth of the Pascagoula River. That was about a forty minute run. Once there we stopped to fill up with gas, and then ran about sixty minutes up the Pascagoula to get to the little oxbow lake that Chuck was fishing.

The creek getting in to Chuck’s lake proved to be our next obstacle. The water has been falling for a few days, and we were faced with a quarter mile of pushing, pulling, jumping trees, and fighting our way up this shallow, narrow chute into the lake. One of the other top-10 guys was also fishing the same lake, and once he got all the way from Biloxi to the entrance of that chute this morning, he decided it would be impassable today so went looking for a new place to fish. Chuck though wasn’t deterred by the falling water and he fought his way all the way up into the lake, which means that his camera boat had to also. Between our run through the Gulf, our stop for gas, our run up the river, and our ordeal getting though the chute, we started filming Chuck fishing at 11:20, two and a half hours after we took-off.

The fishing was slow, but we got some good footage anyway, thanks in part to Chuck falling out of the boat after missing a fish! It was funny, mostly because we all knew that back at the weigh-in they wouldn’t be able to resist showing that clip to the crowd when Chuck was up on stage. He did managed though to catch two good fish before the end of the day, for almost five pounds, and that was enough to keep him alive to fish in the final five tomorrow.

Getting out of the lake in the afternoon turned into another adventure. Chuck entered the chute ahead of us because if we got stuck, he didn’t want our boat blocking him in. Much to his dismay though half-way out the chute he encountered another boat, that of Oga, the Japanese photographer, stuck solid and blocking Chuck’s exit! Oga had disabled both his big motor and his trolling motor in his attempts to move the boat, and was now in the water himself attempting to lift and push the boat out.

Chuck of course was fishing for a lot of money, and had much more experience in moving boats around in situations like this, so somehow he managed to get Oga’s boat moved a little and his own boat around and past, and then he was off on the rest of his long ride to Biloxi. We were next, and we also managed to get past the stuck boat, but we didn’t have the same incentive to continue on. There’s no telling how long Oga had been pushing his boat, but he was covered in mud, physically exhausted, and scared. He is Japanese, has a difficult time communicating in English, and here he was all by himself, stuck in the backwoods and swamps of south Mississippi, miles from the nearest road, with no phone and no radio. The water was falling and his incapacitated boat, if left where it was for another 24 hours, could well be staying there for another six months.

We decided to abandon Chuck, who was miles ahead of us at this point anyway, and help Oga. We managed to work our boat out in front of his, and with him in the water pushing and us in front towing, we eventually got the two boats back out into the main river. In the process though we succeeded in breaking our own trolling motor as well. Once out in the river, we towed Oga’s boat a few miles down to the nearest launch ramp, where we tied it up and left it, and the three of us then rode in the camera boat back upriver 10 or 15 miles to Oga’s truck, where we loaded our boat onto his trailer, then raced back to WalMart with the cameras to shoot the weigh-in.

Oga had had a tough day, and it wasn't over yet as he'd have to come all the way back after dark to retreive his boat, but still he managed to retain some sense of humor. On the ride back in the truck, with this situation under control and everyone safe, we were glancing through the Japanese fishing magazines we found strewn about the floor of the truck, and learning more about Oga. He is unmarried, he comes from Japan but has lived in Texas for two or three years, and he told us "I must more work on my English. My English that level of Kindergartner." Curious, a few minutes later we asked "Who told you that your English is at a ‘Kindergarten’ level?" His reply, "Texas women", had us all cracking up laughing!