Lake Murray locals tough on tournament anglers

Lake Murray, near Columbia, S.C., is proving to to be one of the toughest venues to hold a professional bass fishing championship.

The fishing isn’t so tough, even in August, when the Forrest Wood Cup is held. However, competitors in the Forrest Wood Cup have had to navigate an unusually complicated relationship with local anglers.

During the 2008 Forrest Wood Cup at Lake Murray, a local angler who was not in the tournament tried to upstage the top pros in the championship. He crowded and cut off Mark Rose of Marion, who was in contention to win. The experience so unnerved Rose that it probably cost him $1 million.

I was in a media boat with a local driver, and we were right next to the guy the whole time. We covered the incident in this space, and tournament fans around the world read about it when BassFan.com posted a link to the column.

The guy, who was not named in the article, recognized himself and actually had the nerve to call the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and complain.

On Wednesday, Colin Moore, a member of the FLW Outdoors staff, asked for my recollections about the incident. It seems that Scott Martin, winner of the 2011 Forrest Wood Cup, had a similar conflict with a local angler. That same guy also clashed with Anthony Gagliardi, a Lake Murray local who eventually won the tournament.

Their conflicts occurred in a cove where bass broke on the surface. The local guy, by all accounts, was there first and had first rights to the water. However, the cove was big enough for multiple boats. Martin and Gagliardi asked the guy if the could fish near him. He didn’t answer. They fished very close to each other, got in each others’ way and cast over each others’ lines.

At that point — by all accounts — the guy became belligerent, while Martin and Gagliardi held their tongues. Moore said that Martin feared that the guy intended to ram his boat. It unnerved him out of contention, much as the 2008 clash did to Rose.

Jeff Samsel, a respected fishing writer that I have known for 18 years, witnessed the Gagliardi conflict from a close distance and described it on his blog. His post was sympathetic to Gagliardi, but his account seemed to suggest that neither party was blameless.

Thinking it might have been the same guy who badgered Rose, Moore asked if I remembered the guy’s name.

It didn’t sound like the same person. The guy who ruined Rose’s tournament tracked the leaders’ positions on the Internet and sought them out one by one. He was a weird and creepy dude.

The guy who clashed with Martin and Gagliardi appeared to be a crank who resented a professional angler and his entourage intruding on his weekend of fishing. That might be why he told Gagliardi — according to Samsel — to “get a real job.” Samsel posted a photo of the guy on his blog. It was not Rose’s antagonist.

Admittedly, none of these incidents are on par with the Bassmaster Classic in the Louisiana Delta a few years ago when an angry dock owner fired a gun at Gary Klein’s boat for throwing a big wake against his dock. Curiously, no charges were filed in that incident.

Competition between tournament and recreational anglers is inevitable on public waters, especially on weekends. A few wannabes want to upstage the pros. Others resent sharing water with pros and their entourages of fans.

On the other hand, the venues for Forrest Wood Cup and the Bassmaster Classic are announced a year in advance. Locals should know that those respective weekends will be disruptive.

Conversely, most pros understand that most of them are guests on the waters they fish, and that non-competitors have as much right to fish public waters as they do. Most of them factor local pressure into their angling algorithms and adjust to it accordingly.

A few, like Ish Monroe, reject that reality. He’s certainly not shy about hectoring audiences on the weighin stage and demanding they stay out of “his” water.

Likewise, many local anglers leave their rods at home during tournaments, especially during the last two rounds.

Competition for productive water is as old as fishing itself, and anglers have evolved a complicated gentleman’s code to keep the peace.

A major championship is a touchy place for that system to break down.