LAWYER AT CENTER OF THE CASE AGAINST BP HOLDS 57 WORLD RECORDS
Aug 24, 2012
Published 8/24/12 By Ben Raines, Press-Register
http://blog.al.com/live/2012/08/lawyer_at_center_of_the.html
Robert Cunningham's new fishing book, "Chasing Records, an Angler's Quest," details two decades spent in pursuit of 57 fishing world records. Cunningham, a Mobile native, is now at the center of the BP oil spill litigation. The book, published by Skyhorse Publishing, is available at area bookstores. (Courtesy Skyhorse Publishing)
Robert Cunningham specializes in catching big fish on tiny lines. (Photo courtesy Robert Cunningham)
For as long as there have been high-pressure jobs, those in them have found
ways to blow off steam.
Winston Churchill shook off the weight of defending the free world by
rendering bucolic scenes in watercolor.
Herbert Hoover, eager to escape the stress of steering the nation into
the Great Depression, routinely fled the capitol for a mountain stream
in Virginia where he caught tiny brook trout as the economy crumbled.
Mobile's Robert Cunningham — on the trial team taking on BP,
Transocean and Halliburton, and ranked as one of the nation's top
lawyers by Lawdragon magazine — unwinds by setting world records.
Lots of world records.
So far, Cunningham has notched 57 international world records for catching
all manner of fish, from the lowly bluegill to gamefish like cobia and
roosterfish.
He specializes in catching big fish on tiny lines, often as light as two-pound
test, which means the line would break if you tried to lift a two-pound
weight with it.
To get a feel for what he does, imagine using a reel spooled with line
as wispy as a human hair to catch a fish that measured five feet long
and weighed 73 pounds, a feat Cunningham accomplished in Orange Beach in 1999.
In a new book he authored, "Chasing Records, an Angler's Quest,"
Cunningham offers a peek into the piscatorial alter ego of one of the
lead lawyers in the Deepwater Horizon litigation. Appointed to the Plaintiffs'
Steering Committee, Cunningham was the leader of the trial team for the
BP trial in February of 2012. He was in New Orleans, preparing for an
upcoming trial against Transocean, Halliburton, and other the companies
that played roles in the BP disaster, when interviewed for this story.
"Chasing Records" serves as both an amusing journey into the
depths of one angler's singular obsession and as a fisherman's
love note to the Gulf Coast.
As a kid, Cunningham, who introduces himself as "Bobo" in conversation,
spent Saturday mornings in the old Mobile courthouse watching his father
plead cases in police court. When court was out of session, his father
took him fishing.
"If you grew up in Mobile, you pretty much fished," Cunningham
said. "My grandfather fished. My dad fished. All my uncles fished.
It was the leading outdoor activity here. It was just part of growing up."
After graduating from high school, Cunningham joined the Marine Corps
in 1965, just as the Vietnam War cranked up. He flew hundreds of combat
missions as a helicopter pilot, including during the battle of Khe Sahn
and the Tet Offensive. Wounded during Tet, he earned both the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the Purple Heart. College and law school came after he
returned home, and he joined his father's practice, Mobile's Cunningham
Bounds law firm.
He caught the fever that would consume him for the next 20 years while
on a tarpon fishing trip to Costa Rica in 1989. There he happened upon
a copy of the International Game Fishing Association rulebook, which included
a list of current world record fish.
Returning home to Alabama, Cunningham set out to break a world record,
in this case for redfish caught on two-pound test. Within a year, after
landing a 13-pound redfish on line about as strong as a piece of sewing
thread, he was a record holder. He was also saddled with an obsession.
He likens the adrenaline rush of playing a record fish to landing on the
deck of an aircraft carrier, flying a helicopter into a hot zone, or waiting
on a jury of 12 strangers to settle a million-dollar case.
He spent the next 20 years breaking records, and earned an amazing 11
world records in a single year. For every record he set, there were dozens
of fish that got away, often after fights that lasted for hours. One world
record fish was stolen from a cooler and eaten by a stray dog on a sparsely
populated island in the Caribbean before the catch could be certified.
When he wasn't on the water, he was in the courtroom, winning millions
of dollars in court for his clients, including a record $3.6 billion judgment
for the state of Alabama against ExxonMobil.
But as soon as the gavel came down on a big case, Cunningham was back
on the water. As the records accumulated, his version of fishing became
ever more precise, for in the realm of world record catches, little things matter.
After a few potential record catches were rejected by the international
body in charge of records because the line Cunningham used turned out
to be stronger than what was advertised on the package, he began having
the organization test the spools of line he bought before he put it on
his reels.
After a record was rejected because a section of the monofilament connecting
his fly line to his lure was too long, he began carefully measuring and
tying up dozens of lines at home so no errors would be made on the boat.
Sometimes, he fished in the open Gulf from the pontoon of his floatplane.
Often, he spent days alone in a boat dozens of miles from shore.
"There was something appealing about being alone out on the Gulf
for hour after hour," Cunningham writes in his book. "The Gulf
is a wild place. Being out there is almost like being in a jungle where
there are all kinds of exotic forms of life, and at any moment one of
them can appear and surprise you."
He said last week that he found the solitude curative, but was often at
a loss to explain it to friends, who thought it sounded monotonous and boring.
"I do a lot of thinking out there in addition to fishing. I think
you can do that in the quiet of nature a lot better than you can anywhere
else," Cunningham said last week. "My profession, you're
going full speed an awful lot of the time. It's really nice to be
alone, have time to think."
Asked why he liked to fish, Cunningham was briefly stumped.
"I don't know anything to say, but it is fun," he finally
offered. "You've got to be outside to do it. You can't do
it from a chair in your house. There's not really a better hobby than
that."
He had an ulterior motive in writing his book, he said. He hopes to elevate
the northern Gulf's reputation as a world class fishery, and counter
the notion that Florida is "the center of the angling universe."
"I wanted to show that this part of the Gulf, the northern Gulf,
is an incredible place to fish. I don't think enough of us have an
opportunity to appreciate what a fantastic fishery it is, not just in
the Gulf, but all the tributary rivers and the Mobile Delta," Cunningham
said. "You do not have to travel to find great fishing. It's
right at our doorstep. You can fish for a hundred different species and
have a great time doing it."
When the BP well blew and images of a Gulf coated in oil were inescapable,
Cunningham feared all would be lost.
"I felt sick. You know. Just sick. Like everybody, I hoped it would
be capped quickly. That would have limited the damage so that it would
not really have been that big a deal," Cunningham said. "I never
dreamed the spill would continue as long as it did. Then you add to the
oil the use of dispersants and all the questions raised by that issue.
Everyone is wondering what's going to happen, especially guides and
people who depend for their livelihood on the Gulf. You think of all them
and you're really talking about a serious situation."
Meanwhile, in between court dates and trips to London to depose witnesses,
Cunningham is sneaking in some fishing off Venice, La., with a famed tarpon
guide named Capt. Coon Schouest.
A few years ago fishing aboard Coon's boat, he caught a tarpon that
ranks as the Louisiana state fly rod record. What he's after now is
a tarpon better than 200 pounds, something he's been chasing for more
than a decade.
"I've been five days and hooked one fish. But that's the
way it is when you're chasing records."
The book is available at McCoy Outdoor Co., in Mobile, Books a Million,
Page and Palette and the Church Mouse in Fairhope, Just Books in Gulf
Shores, Bienville Books, Quint's Sporting Goods, and through online
retailers such as Amazon.