The Biggest HPFC Success Story of 2023
We’ve had a lot of success stories throughout 2023, including great fish catches of our own and helping others enjoy amazing on-the-water experiences, but our greatest achievement may have occurred while we were nearly 1,000 miles away.
You see, while we love catching fish ourselves, we also love connecting like-minded people, building a community of anglers and would-be anglers who otherwise wouldn’t know one another. We’ve met so many people – and made lifelong friends – who we wouldn’t have met without the social lubricant of fishing, but we’ve also learned that we can serve as connectors.
The culmination of that process occurred in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin in July. Our friend Dale Steele has been with us to Mexico numerous times as well as on a wolf fish adventure in Brazil in 2019, and our first trip to Panama in 2021. He lives in far west Texas and craved a smallmouth adventure. Coincidentally, our friends Mike Yee and Samantha Sukupcak live in the heart of smallmouth country, and own a place in Sturgeon Bay. They have likewise been to Mexico with us many times, as well as Panama and Guatemala, and she and Hanna have been on several trips together as well.
They arranged for Dale to join them up there in July and immediately put him on fish – he landed a PB 5-pounder in the first 20 minutes and then went on to catch giant after giant after giant. Admittedly, I was jealous, since the we’d been offered an opportunity to join them and hadn’t been able to make it, but I was also thrilled. Our plan is working. We continue to meet and become lifelong friends with people who share our love of this sport and wonderment at its many opportunities, and the ultimate proof of concept is that many of them become lifelong friends as well.
Epilogue: Sam saved the best for last, with a late September PB of her own, a 7.1 pound ancient smallmouth that looks as if it was about to burst. More news from her is coming in 2024!
