HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

A Reel Fish Story

Junior Heidi Mason is hooked on deep-sea fishing

By Chile Hidalgo
Special to the Gazette

Heidi Mason poses with a freshly caught toy shark in her Cabot House room. The junior from Miami has set four world records in deep-sea fishing. Photo by Jon Chase.

Imagine fighting an animal four times your size. Imagine struggling with the creature for six hours in the driving rain, your hands covered with blood from burst blisters. Imagine feeling its pressure pulling against you as you try to remain on your feet. Now imagine doing it all for fun.

That's exactly what Heidi Mason '00 has been doing for the past 14 years. The junior from Miami started deep-sea fishing at age 6, entered her first professional tournament five years later, and now stands among the elite of women's fishing. She has set four world records, three of which still stand, and she continues to go home three times a year to participate in tournaments. "It's a way of life," Mason says.

From a young age, Mason was attracted to the sport. "I grew up on a lake, and I caught about everything there," she notes. Her father, Donald Mason, traces his daughter's love of fishing to her diaper changing table. One of the elder Mason's prized catches, an enormous hammerhead shark, was mounted on the wall facing the table. While facing the big fish may have been slightly unnerving to young Heidi, it may have proved the turning point in the long run.

Her father's fishing habits may have also influenced his daughter's path. While he does not fish professionally, Donald Mason has been know to venture as far north as Alaska on fishing trips, catching salmon just a few feet from 1,000-pound grizzlies. "I've been fishing forever," he says. As a lawyer, he often takes his clients out fishing; it was on one of those trips that his daughter first went deep-sea fishing.

"It was a rainy, cold, slow day," Donald Mason remembers. "We had six lines going, and nothing was biting." As Heidi's first adventure in salt water, it proved entirely anticlimactic until 15 minutes before the group planned to pack it in for the day. At that point, one of the lines began to stir. As her father reached for the pole, the 6-year-old Heidi quickly stepped in front of him, grabbed the rod, and caught a 53-pound sailfish. With that, she was hooked.

That year she began participating in the Met - one of the three biggest tournaments of the season. At age 10, she turned pro. She's never finished out of the top 10 in any competition she has entered. And there's the matter of the three world records, one of which was for a 463-pound hammerhead shark. Two grown men could barely lug it onto the boat, and it stuck out from both sides of the boat as the crew headed for shore. Or the 139-pound Tarpon that she hooked on the first cast and battled for two-and-a-half hours.

Mason once simultaneously fought two fish - a 69-pound white marlin and a 68-pound sailfish - and caught both of them. She's also matched skills with an Atlantic sailfish for nearly eight hours only to end the day by releasing it. And she became the first (and to this day remains the only) woman to win the Bob Lewis Tournament, the Miami Tournament, and the Met, the three most prestigious angling events in Miami.

Mason quickly became one of the most recognizable women anglers in the Miami area. Of course, at the time not many other females were recognized in professional fishing, never mind a teenager who barely weighed as much as the fish she regularly caught. The majority of the fishing community welcomed her with open arms, but there were those who questioned her abilities. Donald Mason recalls the skeptics who wondered whether he or another man might be catching fish for his daughter.

"When a 200-pound, six-foot guy gets whipped by a schoolgirl, there's going to be a lot of mumbling and grumbling," he notes. But the younger Mason passed polygraph tests with flying colors. As her father recalls, "There were a lot of red faces."

Nowadays, Mason has become a celebrity in Florida, where she has participated in charity events alongside sports figures from the Miami Heat, Miami Dolphins, and Florida Panthers. Long gone are the days when she was shooed out of registration tents and told that the area was "just for anglers."

Mason has put her celebrity status to good use, speaking out in favor of the preservation of the Everglades and catch-and-release fishing to conserve existing stock. Even in her earliest fishing experiences, Mason released most of her catches. These days, she finds satisfaction in the fact that fishes she caught, tagged, and released years ago have been re-caught and re-released by fellow anglers.

"I've noticed a decrease in the fish population, and that's only since I started fishing," she says. With protective legislation slow in coming, she's expended much effort calling for preservation, which she describes as "vital for the fish population."

At Harvard, Mason, a history of science concentrator and a pre-medical student, spent two years on the varsity sailing team. She serves as a tutor through Phillips Brooks House and is also an officer for the Pets as Therapy program, which brings local pets to visit nursing homes. This fall, she has played on Cabot House's all-women intramural touch football team. She has participated in fewer fishing tournaments since coming to Harvard, but still flies home three times a year to participate in the main Miami events.

Despite the fact that the word "fishing" does not generally ignite the same sort of passion in New England as it does in Miami, her experiences have led Mason to believe that fishing is a near-universal activity. "Everyone has a fishing story," she says. By the time she's through, Heidi Mason should have as many as anyone.