North/South Carolina team win fourth annual Baldwinsville carp tournament on Seneca River (photo slide show/video)

By David Figura/The Post-Standard

May 16, 2010, 8:35AM

 

The owner of a pay-to-fish carp fishing lake in North Carolina and his fishing partner pulled away from the field Saturday morning with a flurry of catches to win the CARP Tournament Series Northeast Regionals on the Seneca River.

Tony Crawford of Kings Mountain, N.C. and Mike Waldrup, of Gaffney, S.C., pulled in a total of 84 fish, weighing 1,360 pounds, 6 ounces during 50 straight hours of fishing to win the event’s $3,000 grand prize. They bested a 41-team field, which included participants from across the United States, along with six foreign countries (Canada, England, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republican and Poland).

"We fished our tails off last night," said a tired Crawford at 10:25 a.m. Saturday.

In the half hour before the tournament ended, the two southerners turned up the heat. On several occasions, each reeled in a fish at the same time. One lunker broke Crawford’s line.

"Look at that," Crawford smiled, holding up his busted line. "I lost my rig to that pig."

The team of Bill Syler and Richie Eldridge, from Akron, Ohio finished second, taking home $2,500. The third place finishers, Mihai Acui and Bogdan Bucur, representing Romania, finished third, earning $1,500.

Acui and Bucur ended up being the competition’s top money earners. They also won "The Big Four" category (the largest cumulative weight of top four fish) to earn an extra $2,000 – for a total of $3,500 in earnings.

Another team with Hungarian roots, Attila Horvath and Benjamin Miko, landed the biggest fish of the tournament. They took home $1,000 for their 36-pound fish.

The tournament started at 9 a.m. Thursday and concluded at 11 a.m. Saturday. Most anglers went the distance with no or little sleep as they vied for a prize pool of $10,000 in cash and $5,000 in tackle and other prizes.

Tournament director David Moore went everything off without a hitch. The only problem this year, he said, was that overall the bite was slow. "The fish didn’t cooperate as well as they have in the past. The weather played a factor," he said.

Crawford is no stranger to competitive carp fishing, having fished competitively for the fish since he was 6 years old, he said. His father ran a "pay lake" in North Carolina where anglers paid to fish and competed for daily winnings. Today, he and his brother both own pay lakes stocked with carp.

"It’s been going on for years down there," he said, adding there’s more than 200 pay lakes for carp in the North Carolina/South Carolina area.

Many of the foreign competitors, particularly the Europeans, prefer long poles (10 to 12 feet long) and spinning reels. They use boiled dough balls (called "boilies) for bait and have separate "hair rig" hook setups. They then pack a small, snowball-sized ball of bait around it before casting it out.

Not this year’s winners. They were using 7 ½-foot-long, bait casting rods and hooked their bait (corn puffs scented with orange, red chocolate, butternut) right to the hook. And around that, they packed a bait ball of damp oats and grits.

"That’s why they’re still in Europe learning," joked Crawford.

Half of last year’s winning team, Colin Peters, also of North Carolina, came this year with a new partner, Jason Cann, a friend from England. They finished 12th, with 25 fish weighing 395 pounds, 15 ounces.

This year’s top local team was Tamas Vegvari and Norbert Samok, both of Solvay. They finished fifth, catching 51 fish weighing a total of 886 pounds, 12 ounces.

Last year’s top local team was Eric Ames, of Constantia, and his partner, Steve Ware, of Fayetteville, who finished second overall. This year, they weren’t as lucky, only pulling in six fish, weighing 103 pounds, 3 oz., to finish 34th.

"We did terrible. It was bad fishing," Ames said. "We were in a dead zone."

For the fourth consecutive year, Baldwinsville Mayor Joe Saraceni was also in the mix. He and his brother Tony finished 19th with 13 fish weighing 228 pounds, 4 ounces.