Sharks, a Shipp and Cousin Eddie: What we saw at the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo

You expect to see some things, at the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, and the 90th edition didn’t disappoint as it came to a close on Sunday.

Thousands of people flocked to the rodeo site on Dauphin Island throughout the afternoon despite sweltering heat broken late in the day by a brief but torrential shower.

Sights included a steady stream of fish, as anglers arrived by land and by sea; more sharks, though nothing to match a record-breaker caught on Friday; a fake celebrity and a real one; and the ceremonial dunking of the rodeo president.

The rodeo site features a display area where some of the most intriguing fish brought in are laid out on ice for visitors to see and touch.

On Sunday, the area was staffed by some unusually young volunteer scientists. 10-year-old Khloe Weber showed off a dinner plate-sized octopus, encouraging other kids to touch it and to let her drape one of its arms over their hand.

Asked for their oddest exhibit, Weber and Ava Powers showed off a flying gurnard, spreading out its winglike fins.

At the dock, an even odder figure came into view as the Lady Ann, a charter boat based on Dauphin Island, came in: Among the people on deck was someone who looked an awful lot like Cousin Eddie, the deranged Randy Quaid character from the National Lampoon “Vacation” movies. He had the bathrobe, he had the cigar, he had the trapper hat.

And yes, the hat was hot, confirmed Stephen Laurendine, the man embodying the icon. “The same team on Lady Ann has been riding together for 10 years, probably the first year one of the guys said I looked like Cousin Eddie. I really didn’t know who Cousin Eddie was, but it turned out I kind of looked like him.” So he leaned into it. “They no longer call me my name. I’m always Cousin Eddie.”

Another member of the crew on Lady Ann, Melvin Dunn, was telling the story of the one that got away.

“We lost one close to 200 pounds,” he said of a tuna hooked early Friday. “We fought him for three hours, got him 80 feet from the boat, and the line broke. Good fish, really good fish. Big yellowfin. It would have been our biggest.”

Seeing the Lady Ann at the dock on Sunday afternoon was predictable:

The usual pattern is that the biggest boats go out the farthest and stay out the longest. Dunn said the Lady Ann had left Thursday night, but hadn’t gone that far, fishing areas about 75 miles out.

“Normally we go a lot farther,” he said.

“This year we just decided to stay in close. The blue water was there, so at $4 a gallon, why go waste fuel? We could have went 125 miles and just burned a whole lot more fuel. We caught so many fish on Friday we went through 1,800 pounds of ice. We had 60 dolphin [Mahi Mahi] on the boat, 10 yellowfin, plus everything else. We only had so much ice, we had to quit fishing this morning because we didn’t have enough ice to ice everything down.”

As rodeo staff and volunteers kept busy at the weigh station, they had a visit from a special guest: Retired marine scientist Bob Shipp, professor emeritus of the University of South Alabama’s Marine Sciences Department and the guy who literally wrote the book on the fishes of the Gulf of Mexico.

Shipp, who served for many years as the rodeo’s head judge, was influential in cultivating connections between the rodeo and the scientific community. (Every year, scientists take samples from thousands of fish along with data on how and where they were caught.)

It had been three or four years since Shipp, 80, last attended the rodeo. But he seemed to feel at home as he watched the proceedings in the weigh station and talked to a steady stream of well-wishers.

“It’s fun, having a little insight into some of this stuff,” he said.

“When we first got started, the first year I was involved was ‘82,” Shipp said of the rodeo. “It was nothing but a good little fishing with a half-dozen species categories, and when we decided to try to use the information to help support a masters program at the university, it just swelled after that. This is what it is today. You know, the Guinness Book of Records people were here a few years ago and they declared this the biggest and oldest fishing tournament in the world.”

At 5 p.m., a ceremonial cannon blast signified the end of competition. The weigh station would keep hopping for another hour or more, as workers processed a backlog of entries from boats that had arrived before the gun.

Among them: a 410-pound tiger shark brought in by brothers Danny and Mark Winstanley, using a boat that Danny Winstanley’s son had won at the 2003 rodeo.

“Me and him been fishing these things since we was like 12,” said Mark Winstanley. “We’d go shark fishing in a 14-foot boat. We was so crazy.”

You don’t have to be crazy to be involved in the rodeo, though they say it helps. Shortly after the cannon blast, Rodeo President Kevin Marks received the traditional show of appreciation from his fellow Mobile Jaycees: They threw him off the dock.

As he lingered in the water, and as he hugged fellow rodeo officials afterward, Marks looked like a man who’d just felt a large weight lift from his shoulders.

“It was a really special moment,” Marks said. “There is a lot of work that goes into this. And I’ve got a team of people that have supported this direction all year long. And that has driven the level of success that we’ve achieved in providing this event for the community.”

Marks said 3,630 anglers had bought tickets, and that sponsor packages brought the total to 4,372. But what stood out for him was “the camaraderie of this group.”

“That has brought us all together on completing a single goal, of putting on a successful tournament,” he said.

Related: More sharks come in as 90th Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo concludes