CityView Magazine

HOOKED Two days, no sleep, five fish By Allison Williams Above | The lure of the Cape Fear River is mighty strong. On a weekend in May, it lured 109 teams in search of the river’s biggest catfish, bragging rights and cash prizes. Above | Boy versus fish: Tyler Sessoms, 8, with his prize catch. he day after he and two buddies caught 85 pounds of slippery, slimy and whiskered catfish, Kevin Jackson sat down in a room off the Charlie Rose Agri-Expo Center and let a polygraph examiner strap him to a lawn chair. T Two stretchy cords circled his chest. A blood pressure cuff went around his arm. A small clip attached to his right index finger. They would record his breathing, pulse and the tiniest activity of his sweat glands – any clues that this fish tale was just that. The polygrapher threw out a few softball questions and a joke, trying to put him at ease. “If you make a mistake, your partners would shoot you.” Jackson chuckled weakly. A machinist from Gray’s Creek, Jackson 50|August/September • 2009 would say later, “I just came out here to fish.” It had been 30 hours since he’d last slept and since then he had dodged thunderstorms that delivered downpours and lightning, fixed a busted aerator pump and backtracked to Wilmington to pick up a friend. And now here he was, straight off the Cape Fear River on a Sunday morning in the same rain-soaked and sun-dried clothes from the day before with a night’s scratchy strawberry-blonde beard. Did you lie to me when you said you are an honest and truthful person? the polygrapher asked. Did you or your partners knowingly violate tournament rules? A shower, shave and a change of clothes would have to wait; $3,000 was riding on this moment. Jackson has been an angler all his life. He’s one of the founding members of the Long Whiskers Catfish Club, a good old boy who grew up trawling the Cape Fear River. But the annual

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