13-year-old Eagle Valley Middle School boys walk away from GoPro Mountain Games Orvis Species Slam with some serious cash

Oscar Wilde once said, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”

A pair of Eagle 13-year-olds showed everything they knew at the GoPro Mountain Games two weeks ago, outsmarting most of their older, more experienced competitors in the Orvis Species Slam — a new event where teams of two caught as many different local species as they could in six hours. Going up against a field of seasoned fly-fishing guides and other adults, Hudson Rozga and Charlie Stone placed second overall and won the longest fish contest, netting $1,350 in the process. Of course, the Eagle Valley Middle School buddies weren’t lured to their first-ever fishing competition by cash.

“We were mostly just there to have fun,” Stone said.

“Yeah, we didn’t think we were going to win at all, really,” Rozga added. “We knew we had the potential to, but we had no idea what was going to happen. I mean, it’s all about luck really.”

The Trout Fanatics — their team name was ripped directly from Rozga’s fishing-focused YouTube channel (where you can view each of the five catches the pair netted during the competition) — would indeed require a last-second miracle to get on the podium.

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“We started slow and kind of lost motivation,” Stone admitted.

After a meeting at Vail Christian High School, teams raced to their cars at the 9 a.m. start and bolted for Gypsum, hoping to entice a notorious local smallmouth bass.

“There was this one fish that people knew of,” Stone explained. He just hangs out in the same spot. We were there today and he was still there. Everyone was going for that fish.”

Nobody would convince it to bite, but eventually, Rozga hooked a rainbow trout, one of the seven scored species. Rainbow, brown and brook trout were each worth 25 points, as were bluegills. A cutthroat trout was 50, and mountain whitefish and smallmouth bass brought in 75 a pop.

The friends, who met two days after Stone moved to town in second grade and have been close ever since, eventually decided to relocate to Brush Creek. It was the turning point.

“We went to the creek and it was like that second, (Hudson) hooked onto a fish and we realized it was massive because it was just running him downstream,” Stone said of the $500-winning, 19-inch brown trout, which he went waist-deep to net. Rozga had scouted the spot every day leading up to the competition.

“The first five minutes, he was moving onto different spots but I stayed there and was casting in. And then he ate it and just immediately ran downstream,” he said.

“It was a tough fight. It should have gotten away for sure, but we kept on him. Charlie netted him — if he wasn’t there, it wouldn’t have worked out.”

“It got our energy up a ton,” Rozga continued of the specimen, which tied for the longest fish caught by any team (the Trout Fanatics won on a tie-breaker).

“We knew we had the potential (to place) so we just kept going and we didn’t stop until the last minute.”

It’s a good thing they didn’t.

With 3 p.m. approaching, most started to pack up and head back to their cars. With five minutes left on the clock, the persistent Rozga reeled in a smallmouth bass, launching the team into the silver medal position.

“I stayed there,” Rozga recalled. “I was just casting in these little pockets of water that weeds were surrounding and this bass ate it. We didn’t know it was a bass until we got it on the bank in the net. It was exciting.”

“We started freaking out — mostly me,” Stone added.

During the entire car ride back to Edwards, the pair couldn’t stop talking about the day and refreshing the Cinebody App, where every team was required to upload a video of their catches. For what it’s worth, neither teen felt the new-age score-keeping mechanism provided any sort of generational advantage.

“I mean I wouldn’t say so,” Stone said when asked, almost unsure if the question was a serious one.

Jeremy Sides and Cody Burgdorff, teammates on a third-place finishing squad at the 2018 U.S. National Fly-Fishing Championships, ended up catching all seven species to win the competition. Local guides Shaun Twomey and Andy Smith — winners of the 2021 Yeti Catch Wars — claimed third place. They finished with five species but had less total points than Rozga and Stone, largely on account of that final smallmouth bass.

“That was the fish that won it for us,” Rozga said.

While Wilde’s words work to explain the teens’ success two Sundays ago, another Proverb — “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction” — would be more applicable in answering the big question: how’d you guys learn to fish?

“My dad is a big part,” Rozga said. “He was a big fisherman and got me into it when I was little.”

“My dad wanted to learn with me and he bought two rods from his friend whom he plays golf with who was a guide,” Stone added. “We just went down to the field by our house and practiced casting. Another one of my dad’s friends came to help us catch our first fish.”

Stone and Rozga said they fish whenever they can squeeze it in between their BMX, baseball and golf commitments. In the complex fly-fishing game, Stone enjoys learning how to read the river and Rozga revs his engine tying flies and perfecting his clear-water casting accuracy.

“I like when you can actually see the fish and have the skill to cast it onto it, right in front of its face and watch him eat it,” he said.

They both turn to YouTube for techniques, of course, but aren’t averse to reading a fishing column here or there, either. Next year, they plan on returning to the Mountain Games, and possibly signing up for the casting competition, too. Rozga’s wristband — required to prove each catch-and-release video was filmed on the day of the Species Slam — remains intact. Like any 13-year-old boy might joke, he laughed when asked if he was going to just keep it on until next year.

“I think so.”