‘A real challenge.’ Anglers take 1st place after scouring Gulf for these fish

Captain Ryan Rickard has traveled around the Southeast doing redfish tournaments for nearly 20 years.

In that time, he’s seen areas change for the better and worse.

“I think there are some areas that haven’t recovered, like Tampa Bay east of the Skyway. Some areas have really improved, like Apalachicola, St. Marks, Crystal River,” explained Rickard. “Sarasota has been really good down to Boca Grande and Placida. I’ve never seen the fishery as good as it is down there right now.”

With his years of knowledge, Rickard needed all of it before last weekend’s Power Pole National Redfish Tour Florida Gulf Coast Go Live Team Event. The tournament has a unique format. While traditional tournaments have a singular leaving and return point, the Go Live format allowed anglers to fish anywhere they wanted on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

They were given scales to weigh their catch, with the goal of catching the biggest three redfish with a maximum weight of nine pounds allowed. When weighing fish they would film or join social media live to document their catches, meaning all live release at the time of catch.

“This may be the future of some of these tournaments,” said Rickard. “It can get a lot of people engaged. This tournament had a loaded field with the best of the West Coast anglers and more in it.”

With nearly 70 teams in the field, Rickard went scouting in his home waters along the Nature Coast. While he found some fish in the five- to six-pound range, teammate Patrick Marsonek found a school of redfish he thought were better-sized down in the Boca Grande area. On tournament morning, Rickard loaded at 1 a.m., made the three-hour drive south, joining Marsonek and launching at 4:30 a.m. to foggy weather and a low tide.

“When we started fishing, we were in an area with flats and potholes around. The end of the outgoing tide and the beginning of the income, there were tailing all around us dropping into potholes,” said Rickard. “It was shallow. Once it got dirt-dry, they were hemmed up in the potholes and eating pretty much everything we used, jerk-baits and spoons… everything except for topwaters.”

The quality of the fish were indeed good. Marsonek’s thought that they were the right fish was correct. They landed somewhere between 20 and two dozen.

One fish came in at eight pounds and two ounces. Another at eight pounds, five ounces. A third a perfect eight pounds, 15 ounces. The total, over 25 pounds, was Rickard’s goal heading into the tournament.

“I thought 25 pounds would be in the top three. I thought, with this field, someone would come in with a fish right at nine pounds and a few about 8.5,” said Rickard. “I thought we were in good shape, but not in that good of shape. Those were the only three fish we caught over eight pounds.”

By tournament’s end, the 25 pounds and six ounces Rickard and Marsonek caught were indeed in good shape. They would best second-place Team Power Pole / Eupro, who came in with 24 pounds, 11 ounces, and Team Reel Fishing with captain Danny Lathan and Shane Earhart’s 24 pounds, eight ounces. For first place, they would take $11,000.

“It was such a fun event and a real challenge. While tournament fishing, I like to find the right stock of fish, and we did that in this one,” Rickard said.