A Fisherman.
A Long Road.
One Rig.

I grew up on the West Coast in farm country. Behind our house there were ponds — the kind that don't have names, that most people don't even notice — and they were full of catfish. Small ones, maybe half a pound, but when you're eight years old and you pull one in on a crawfish or a worm you dug out of the dirt, it's the whole world.

As I got older I started driving myself to the lakes. My grandfather Glenn and my uncle Dale taught me how to rig up — carolina rigs, the basics, whatever worked. I wasn't catching trophies but I wasn't fishing for trophies. I was fishing because I loved it, and because the water was quiet when everything else wasn't.

A rod in your hand and water in front of you has a way of making the rest of the world sit still for a while. That's what fishing gave me back then. It still does.

I joined the Marines in peacetime. My grandfather Glenn had served as a Marine in Korea, and that meant something to me. The Corps was part of my family's heritage. I also had a woman I planned to marry, and I wanted to build something stable — a life worth coming home to.

Then the war started. Like most Marines, I wanted to go. I was deployed. I came home, not a war hero but I brought back some things I didn't leave with.

When I got out I'd fish here and there — nothing serious, nothing consistent. It wasn't until we moved to Tennessee that things slowed down enough for me to find my way back to the water properly. I'm a 100% VA disabled veteran, and they were telling me for a while that I needed to get outside, get my hands on something real. So I went back to what I always knew. I went back to fishing.

Here's what nobody tells you when you move from the West Coast to the South: the water is completely different. Different terrain, different current, different fish behavior. Everything I knew needed to be relearned. I spent months trying different setups, different spots, different everything — and catching nothing.

Then one day below a dam on the Cumberland, I pulled in a small channel cat. Maybe a pound. Somebody else might have thrown it back without a second thought. I sat there and just looked at it for a minute.

The patience had paid off. The education had paid off. And the rig I had on that day — the same Santee-style setup I'd been dialing in — was the one that finally worked. It's the same rig I've used ever since. It's the same rig I sell today.

I couldn't find what I wanted at a tackle shop. The store-bought rigs were built cheap — light hardware, questionable line, hooks that weren't worth trusting when a real fish hit. So I started tying my own. Heavier mono. Stronger swivels. Bigger circle hooks. Built the way I'd want to find them if I were buying them.

My fishing buddies started asking where they could get them. That's when I figured maybe someone else out there was in the same spot — tired of rigs that don't hold, tired of settling for whatever was on the peg at the chain store.

Blackwater Rigs is the answer to that. One rig, built right, by a guy who fishes the rivers and lakes of Tennessee from the bank and has proven it works. No warehouse. No employees. Just me, tying rigs by hand, and sending them out to people who take their fishing seriously.