The Pink Ladies Fishing Team Gives Breast Cancer Survivors a Therapeutic Outlet

Good morning, Carolyn. Good morning, Ray. Thanks for having me on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I started and own Atlas Tracks. We're a GPS marine tracking company for theft and for safety, and I've been doing that since twenty twelve. We have thousands of customers around the world, so we're tracking them for, asset recovery safety when they're overdue, crazy things like aviation, icebergs. We do, barges and snow grooming. So we're in any every really cool market for tracking for assets. But that's not why we're here today all in pink, are we? That's not why we're here all in pink. When I was volunteering to help with a breast cancer foundation, tournament in two thousand eighteen, I was diagnosed with breast cancer right after that. So that was kind of a real kick kick in the gut, if you could say, for everything that someone thinks when they're they're told, that they have breast cancer. So, in the midst of immediately going through treatments and best course of actions and surgeries and things like that, being in the marine industry, the wonderful folks in the marine industries circled around me and helped me pay bills when I couldn't, whether it be a Ford truck payment or bringing food over or anything I needed, because obviously, you can imagine when you go through surgery and even recovery, it's a very long time to develop strength and courage and, things you need to do to get back out in the in the open and, in in the public eye. And so I thought to myself, well, you know, in the middle of night when I've got nothing else to do, let's start our own foundation. So last year, I started the Pink Ladies Breast Cancer Foundation. I put together a competitive fishing team of gals that are, either recovering or going through currently going through cancer. And we get out there because people don't realize that after treatment, your hands, your feet, everything hurts pretty much going forward for the rest of your lives. And the only thing that made me feel better was picking up a fishing rod, and getting out in that salt air. So that's how we kind of developed that whole, idea of helping others ahead of me that need a little bit of, encouragement like I did. So you made a comment about the Pink Ladies and the first fishing tournament you did. Don't you have one coming up pretty soon? Yes. As a matter of fact, we have our third Pink Ladies Fishing Curement coming up October five. Captain's party is October third, fishing out of any inlet. The weigh in will be at the Sands at Pompano Beach and Sailfish Marina. So we wanted to make sure people all up the East Coast of Florida can fish, and it's open to everybody. We'll have rods for giveaways. We had twelve boats our first year. Where's it gonna be again? Out of any inlet. Out of any inlet. What does that mean? That means you can leave out of Pompano. You can leave out of Palm Beach. You can leave out of Miami. You can leave out of any inlet that you wanna fish. So you don't have to transport the boat to a certain point to start with? No. That's the wonderful thing because people are worried about conserving gas. So if you go out of an inlet, North Palm Beach and you wanna weigh in in North Palm Beach because you fish that way, you can go right to Sailfish Marina. If you wanna fish out of Miami, then you can bring your fish into the Hillsborough Inlet and fish and weigh in at the Sands Harbor Marina, which is in Pompano Beach. So it's great. It allows people to go out and fish. And if they don't have something to weigh in, they just spent a beautiful day out on the water. So less time running, more time fishing? Less time running, more time fishing. And another thing that's really important to mention is this is a hook and hand tournament. As I mentioned earlier, your hands and feet hurt, so a lot of women won't be able to fight a fish from the beginning to the end. We had a girl who came on last year, and she was on her, sixteenth round of chemo. She hooked up to a sailfish, which wasn't even in the category, and this boat that donated fish angler dot com kept her out there till she boated the fish. And she was sick the whole time. So, you know, it's it's more about the fishing and the fun. So hook in hand, open to everybody. We have junior divisions. Men can have teams, ladies. It's really amazing, and we have awesome gear that I'm super proud about. It's our pink ladies fishing tournament. You can buy these on our website anytime year round, and we'll have new ones out for this particular tournament, at the captain's party October third. Another fun thing, we have reef runners building us a nine foot pink skiff, hot pink skiff, with a trailer and a Suzuki engine. So we'll probably auction that off at that tournament, when, they're ready to have that for us. So it's just about done, and I'm really excited to see that little boat. So, Caroline, thank you for being here. Just noticed in your background, tell us about what we're looking at back there by the mirror. Well, what you have is our custom pink ladies fishing rods there. We've got four beautiful spinners that were made by Batson rods. We have four stand up rods by Batson. And the gentleman that actually made them for us is a recovering vet. So he actually designed them for us, and, we've got some a couple bent butts, a couple, four twenties, I think, Shimano's. And, that the best place to put them was right in my living room. Ah, there you go. I guess one of the other things to ask, if if people were to ask to get a Pink Ladies fishing rod, do they do a custom Pink Ladies that is open to the public, or is it just custom for you? They made these for us, but I'm gonna be working to be able to have spinners that are could be online for our our, equipment, which would be a great idea. People can. These are these amazing shirts that Dennis Friel made for us. These are on our website for our fishing for our curtament. So we love these. They're UV also. And we have a lot of people that love walk walking around and wearing those. And we can even customize them on the back. I've even for Casey DeSantis, when she went through breast cancer, I sent her pink lady shirts with DeSantis on the back, and she sent us a beautiful letter saying thank you for making me an honorary pink lady. Very cool. Yeah. I'm gonna have to get with you to get one of those and wear it when I'm riding my motorcycle. I've gotten I've I'm kinda scaly today because fourth of July went out, and now I'm peeling from just riding with the arms up and get a little sunburn. So I love riding. What do you ride? I've got a twenty nineteen Harley, Street Glide CVO. Oh, nice. I spent some time on a Y Glide.