Winter 2024
H
owever, life happens, and
she took another path to
a different type of pointy end of a boat. Her journey has led
her to a kayak, to competitive kayak
fishing and ultimately to a whole new
set of successes.
For those that recall, Rachel is a
nurse and lives in Southern California.
“I had been trying to win my boat
in MLF, but it just hadn’t worked out
yet and then COVID hit,” explained
Rachel. “That changed a lot of things,
and it was harder to get on the water.”
Her hunt for a kayak began.
THE PATH TO KAYAK COMPETITION
“I had been looking at them; but they were surprisingly more expensive than I thought,” recalled Rachel. “I finally found one for under $2,000 in Arizona, and I asked my brother (Joe) to go look at it for me since he lives there, and he did. I ended up Venmo-ing him the money to get it for me and that’s how it all started.”
It all sounds easy enough, but when you spend thousands on a kayak that is longer than your Prius and won’t fit through the door of your house, the challenges can start to pile up.
“First of all, I couldn’t get it in my condo,” she explained. “We even took my door off the hinges and tried that way, but it wouldn’t fit. Luckily, I found a friend who lets me store it in her garage.”
With that hurdle crossed, Rachel had to find a way to get her kayak to the lake.
“It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure,” she stated. “Me and my dad watched YouTube videos and we ended up making this thing – we call it the horns and we finally got it on top of my Prius. Now I’m used to cartopping it, but it was a process.”
Once Rachel had the storage and travel logistics down, she started fishing her local lakes.
“I was still paddling when I first started, then I had to learn to run a trolling motor, how to read sonar and a lot of things that I just didn’t have to do as a co-angler,” she said. “In a sense it turned out much more different than I thought it would.”
COMPETITION ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Rachel is no stranger to success,
and as a co-angler she has already
notched six top-10s in the Western
Division Toyota Series – one on Lake
Havasu, two on Clear Lake and three
on the tidal waters of the California Delta.
Just this past spring, she led the Delta co field with 21- 09 for Day One and was expected to bring home the win. As most Delta locals know, it is a fickle place and as much as the Delta giveth, it will taketh even more. That is what happened to Rachel, and she weighed no fish on Day Two. Even so, she ranked a final weight to earn 4th place with only five fish for the entire event.
DUAL TRAILS
She has fished the past three seasons as a co and in the kayak with similar accolades. In her first kayak tournament in 2020 at Lake Hodges she caught her biggest kayak bass at 23.75-inches.
In 2021, she earned a 3rd place in the American bass Kayak Series Championship on Lake Cachuma.
In 2022, she fished her first Kayak Bass Fishing (KBF) tournament and qualified for the 2022 KBF Championship at Kentucky Lake. She won the Rookie of the Year on her local kayak trail.
For 2023, she claimed two top- five finishes, became the first female to occupy first place in the points race
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