Weekend BlogLog - Aug. 8th

We left work early on Friday and headed up to Charleston Oregon to fish in a tuna fishing competition. I know it sounds strange. Why would we be in a fishing competition?? Well as you know Rick is one of the few who manages the StarKist Tuna brand. The brand team decided it would be a great idea to sponsor the Oregon Tuna Classic this year. So sure enough we drove until about 1:00 in the morning when we finally arrived in Charleston. The next morning we awoke at 4:00 and headed down to the lobby to meet our ride. They hired a professional fisherman and boat for the "StarKist Team" to join the competition.

Our fishing boat was nice and very clean for a fishing boat. Our skipper was Dan. Everyone took one look at us and immediately knew that we were not going to be contenders. I was dressed in designer jeans, a cute black jacket with fur around the hood, a scarf and beanie, Rick was dressed in his surfer hoodie and jeans while his co-worker was dressed in a nice wool sweater. They asked us if we brought our waiters and plastic boots - I think they were silently laughing at us city folks coming to join in the fun.

At 6:00 in the morning they shot the flare and all 65 boats raced away trying to find fish. We went out about 45 miles, no land was in site. It took us almost 3 hours to get out there.




The competition was the total weight of your 5 biggest fish. At 2:00 to 4:00 was weigh in time. Unfortunately we did not catch 5 fish. We got 4 and one got away, so we didn't get to weigh in. Rick caught the first one. It was a big 28 pounder. I caught the second one which was about 15 and Dale reeled in the third one.






We were a little disappointed we didn't get to weigh in but we still had fun. We caught about 60 pounds of Albacore. After the competition all the fish that were caught were donated to the Oregon Food Bank for the homeless. We took one of ours home since we didn't weigh in. We are going to sear up some fresh tuna for dinner - yum!



Of course we had to take pictures with Charlie the Tuna which came all the way from San Francisco. This town loves Charlie the Tuna, they even have a Charlie statue. They had two at one point but someone cut it down as a joke and stole it so the town is in the process of carving another Charlie the Tuna Statue.



After the competition we headed back to our hotel and had a big dinner with all the fisherman. Unfortunately we did not win the contest but we did win one of the raffles. We got a flare - yeah!
It was a fun trip.