Get a Job!

My wife says: "Get a job, talking to guys about fishing is not work"

I have personally met over 6000 charter captains and tournament fishermen over the years, and talked to them at length about all aspects of downrigger fishing. I met them at fishing shows, in store promotional events and salmon derbies across the country.

For starts, I gotta tell you it was the experience of a life time, just from the social perspective; some of these guys are the most incredible people I have ever met. But my son did not pay my travel expenses so I could fly around the country and socialize; my job was to get out there and sell Sharks. I found out quickly it was not going to be an easy task. Having a great product was a good start, but convincing anybody to buy one, that was a different story.

Your typical charter captain is a grumpy old salt, retired, bought into the concept of buying a dreamboat and paying for it buy chartering. To make a long story short, there wasn't a lot of money left over for a lot of them to buy some new fangled fish shaped chrome downrigger weights. Many of them would stand there and laugh at me and say: "you must be kidding!" The younger guys were not so bad, they didn't have all this rigid thinking going on with preconceived notions.

That's usually all it took to get me going. So we would start; as I got into my spiel, the crusty old captains would stand there in a combative stance with their arms crossed on their chests; there was no way any one of them was going to spend $80 on a downrigger weight, let alone four of them.

I started using words like lateral line, thermocline, tracking, sonic signature; and I would ask them a few question about all that. Well it didn't take long before they were scratching their heads, realizing they can't be missing the boat on any of these issues. They were stubborn, but they certainly weren't stupid; they all knew what it means to come back to port with an empty fishing box. After about twenty minutes or so , you could just see they wanted to try this out real bad, but still needed some sort of validation so they could explain to their wives they bought "a what for $80" The clincher was I would tell them "the legendary Captain Jim Munoz, up in Leland swears by them“. Well, at that point they bought one Shark; later they would come back and buy the other three. That's just great, they walk away happy as hell and I have absorbed a half an hour of hostility, rudeness, insults, humiliation etc. Multiply that times 6000 and you can start to understand why I am a little cranky at times.

I thought to myself, this is never going to work; if I have to go through this for every sale to get the product out there, there just isn't enough time in a year to make it worthwhile. But that's how it all got started, one grumpy captain at time. The thing that kept me going though, the following year I would meet these guys again and they were still using the product.

Fishermen are a skeptical bunch, they've heard it all before: "guaranteed to catch fish". So on it went, two, three, four years later; one sale at a time. And my son Carl just kept making them by hand for no wages. No heat in the shop, and living at home with the parents, how much worse can it get. A lot worse! All that was nothing compared to what was coming down the pike.

By this time the Shark was making waves; guys were winning derbies and these grumpy old salts were still using them four years later with great results. Now we caught the attention of the competition; not just cannonballs, but the notion the Shark worked as an attractor was apparently a concern to a few companies. At first we didn't understand what was happening, despite the initial grumpiness, most of the fellas seemed friendly and it was always fun to do the shows. But then things got ugly, extreme negative attacks on our product and on us. There was a well orchestrated behind the scenes campaign going on to put us out of business; rumors about us and the product, it wasn't looking good.

I guess all the hardship we went through toughened us up a bit, we are not quitters. We dug in our heals and just kept right on going, and the rest was history. Just a short note on the hardship, not looking for sympathy: don't need any. Well one day I broke my shoulder a few years back, two of our kids were off at college, another one was recovering from surgery. Winter was around the corner, and we were not finished our wood cutting: big problem. I wasn't ready to beleive my shoulder was broken just yet, because there was too much work left to do; it just hurt a lot. I didn't go into the hospital, not a bright move.

The next day I proceeded to build a solar frame so we could continue splitting the 30 cords of blocks that were piled up outside into the bad weather. The solar frame was later used to dry the wood after it was split. I also build a device to put my saw in so I could start it with my left hand; the shoulder was broken, but my trigger finger worked just fine.

About a month later, we were still splitting wood in the solar frame, the shoulder felt pretty good, so I gave the pull starter on the woodsplitter a good yank. The cheap Honda knock off kicked back hard and snapped my shoulder again with a loud crack. This time my wife made me go to the hospital. I told her what is the point, the guy there will tell me not to use the arm and prescribe some expensive therapy that I can't afford. That's exactly what the doctor said to me, then he went to the next bed in emerge to talk to this other guy, Yoder.

Yoder had been sitting there quietly waiting his turn; Yoder wasn't a big sissy like me. He was not moaning and groaning, he sat there quietly with his wife as the broken bone in his forearm was sticking right through his sleeve. The doctor explained to Yoder, they couldn't perform the surgery at the local hospital, but there was a team waiting in Meaford, (another town just down the road) that could do the job; if Yoder could just get there. You see Yoder lived in Canada for twenty five years, but was not a citizen, paid taxes and everything, but he was not entitled to our health care. Yoder tried unsuccesfully to phone someone he knew in Owen Sound, and he didn't have the funds on him for a taxi ride; the ambulance was not an option, I guess it wasn't an emergency. The doctor wanted the cash for the examination; at $25, at least that sounded like a good deal.

I sat there listening to all this bull shit and thought to myself if I was ever going to do a good deed, it should probably be now. I stuck my head through the curtain and announced I would drive Yoder to Meaford.

I

t was a short interesting drive to Meaford, got to know Yoder and his wife a bit. Heard about their 14 kids, they heard about ours. Dropped Yoder off, never saw him again, (at least not yet) and counted my blessings that I was not injured as bad as him. I didn't tell Ernie what happened to my shoulder, because I didn't want him to feel bad; it was his wood splitter. I am not going to dwell on the hardship, all I can say is we had our fair share.

These days we use the negative attack campaigns as a measure of how well we must be doing. I figure we must be doing pretty damn good judging by the time and effort certain people are spending trying to shut us down.

A lot has changed in ten years, but some things still remain the same; I was in a fishing store the other day talking to one of these grumpy old salts. He says: "how are you today?" "Not bad I said for an old guy on medication" Old, he says; how old are you? I told him I just turned sixty. He laughed and said: "Your still a punk!"