A Boat Ride Like No Other

That's how Texas angler Alton Jones and his marshal likely viewed their accident-marred trip to the north end of the Sabine River Saturday, June 9, during a Bass Pro Shops Bassmaster Elite event.

According to Jones, "I hit stuff going up there every day, but today the water had gone down, and I hit something extra hard. I didn't think anything about it," he said. "I was coming back for check-in during a thunderstorm, passing a redfish boat. When I hit his wake, my nose dipped, and the boat spun 90 degrees and went into the woods. I had knocked my skeg off when I hit that submerged log, and without that skeg, you have no control. You can turn that wheel all you want, and the boat's going where the boat's going."

Fortunately, neither man was injured. A couple of local fishermen quickly came to their aid, but the ropes they had weren't strong enough to pull the boat back into the water.

When Orange County Sheriff's Department officials arrived, they had a large rope that allowed them to get into deeper water and apply more force.

"First responders arrived on the scene in 20 minutes and had me off the bank in 30 minutes," Jones said.

Jones, who is open about his Christian faith, said he and his marshal paused for a moment of prayer before making the 50-mile run back to the weigh-in. Jones said their prayer was answered when his boat landed softly on the mud bank.

"We threaded the needle right through two cypress trees, with about 6 inches of clearance on each side," he said. "That wasn't anything I did. That was God watching over us."

Remarkably, other than for the damage to his skeg, Jones' boat was unscathed.

He said the incident should serve as a warning to other boaters who might be riding around in boats with skegs that are damaged.

"I've been doing this for 28 years, and I've never had anything like this happen," he said. "But I can't tell you how many bass boats I've owned that had a big chunk out of the skeg, and I never thought anything about it. I won't do that anymore--and no one else should either."

Trying to steer a boat without a skeg is "like trying to drive a car with a flat tire" is how Jones described his eye-opening experience.

Modified from an article that appeared in the June 19, 2018, issue of Jay Kumar's BassBlaster. The author was Bryan Brasher, who is editor of Bass Times and a senior writer for B.A.S.S. publications. Brasher has covered the outdoors since the mid-1990s for three newspapers and was named Best Outdoors Writer four times by the Tennessee Sports Writers Association.