She loves baseball and fishing, and Madison Lampe of Mission Hills will remember the Summer of '08 for touching them all in both sports.
As a Little League player who competes as a catcher or first baseman against boys, Madison, 12, hit a home run in her last game with the Cardinals in the Presidio Little League.
She followed that over the weekend by hitting the equivalent of the long ball in ocean fishing by landing a 137-pound striped marlin at Church Rock off the southern tip of Catalina Island.
“She's going to remember this summer that's for sure,” said her father, Scott, a Viking brand broker at Crow's Nest Yachts on Shelter Island. “She had just said to me that here she was 12, and she still hadn't caught her first marlin. She's been watching guys weigh in marlin at Rosie's Green Pier her whole life.”
Madison was helping her father at the Crow's Nest Yachts' fishing derby and Viking Boats Roundup when captain Steve Lassley of Anthony Hsieh's famous tournament boat Bad Company invited her to join him and captain Pete Groesbeck. Their boys, David Lassley, 9, and Alex Groesbeck, 13, also landed marlin over the weekend.
Madison not only got to go fishing with the past winners of nearly $4 million in the 2006 Bisbee Black & Blue Marlin Tournament, but she picked up some marlin fishing lessons from the best in big-game fishing. She spotted one, and Groesbeck quickly casted a bait at it from the bow and handed the rod and reel to Madison.
Then it was game on.
Turns out hitting a home run against the boys is easier than landing a 137-pound striped marlin. She battled it for 45 minutes on 40-pound test line.
“It just went crazy once it was hooked,” she said. “It dove down five times and took off jumping. It was a lot harder than I thought it'd be. They're warriors out there.”
PCT speed hikers
Point Loma's
Reinhold Metzger reports that
Scott Williamson,
first man to yo-yo the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail twice, and
Tatoo Joe Kisner, the previous holder of the speed record for the PCT, were expected to establish a new PCT speed mark today.
Their time of 71 days and four hours will beat Tatoo Joe's old mark of hiking it without a support team by more than eight days. They hiked the historic trail, from the U.S.-Mexico border in Campo to Manning Park at the U.S.-Canada border, with no stove and survived on dehydrated beans, protein powder and nuts.
“It's truly amazing what willpower and determination can accomplish,” said Metzger, the ex-Marine who holds the speed record on the John Muir Trail of five days, 10 hours.
Ed Zieralski: (619) 293-1225; ed.zieralski@uniontrib.com
