After a knee replacement, she’s back to deep sea fishing. And life.

Lauren Foster of Mocksville, North Carolina, is a rarity on the tournament fishing circuit. Most everyone else who competes is male.

Sport fishing is a hobby Foster shares with her husband, Matt, and their 16-year-old daughter, Lilly. The family heads to their place in Beaufort, North Carolina, as often as they can. You can usually find them aboard Bill Collector, a sports fishing charter out of Morehead City, North Carolina.

During fishing season, they’re often at the Outer Banks, aboard Widespread, searching for marlin, wahoo and other big fish.

But a bad knee forced Foster to give up the sport — and nearly everything else she enjoyed. That is until a total knee replacement in September 2024, just before her 41st birthday, got her back in action.

“Teach a person to fish, and they eat for a day,” she likes to quip. “Replace their knee, and they eat for a lifetime.”

Make that: They eat well for a lifetime. Since she began catching her own, Foster has become something of a fish snob. “I won't buy fish at the grocery store,” she said. “I like mahi fresh out of the ocean. If you try to serve me tuna that’s been frozen, I’m not interested.” (See her recipes below.)

She went to Swansboro, North Carolina, for her first postsurgical tournament over Memorial Day weekend. She sent a message to her care team, including surgeon Dr. Calvin Maxwell “Max” McCabe of Novant Health Orthopedics & Sports Medicine - Clemmons to say: “I didn’t get lucky with a marlin, but I did catch the second-place lady angler game fish … standing up. Me and my new knee. Passing along gratitude and happiness. Thanks for everything!”​

A family of anglers

Growing up in the town of Wake Forest, North Carolina, Foster played softball. She took up swimming for fun in college.

And she’s fished for as long as she can remember. “My grandma had a pond, and she taught me to pond fish at a young age,” she recalled. “My husband got me into lake fishing. In 2018, someone invited him to go ocean fishing for the first time. He caught a 60-pound mahi.”

He was — pardon the pun — hooked.

Anglers in Morehead City have likely heard of Matt Foster. His wife and daughter — who have both become ocean anglers themselves — were with him the day he caught his biggest fish. That was a marlin weighing close to 1,000 pounds, and he worked for seven hours to reel it in. “The captain said it was the biggest marlin ever caught on his boat,” Foster said.

The ‘cane’ mutiny

Foster can’t say exactly what led to her knee pain: old sports injuries? Wear and tear? A combination of the two?

But at just 38, she needed medical intervention. She started conservatively with three rounds of cortisone shots spaced about six months apart. “With the first one, I felt like a new person,” she said. “The second one wasn’t as good as the first, but I was still getting around pretty good. The third one was an epic flop.”

That’s when she knew surgery was inevitable. She had no cartilage in her right knee; it was bone on bone. But she had to wait six months before she could be considered a candidate for surgery. “Those last six months when nothing was working, I was having such a hard time getting around,” she said.

She reluctantly put away her fishing gear for an entire year and got a new accessory she’d just as soon have done without: a cane. She had little choice because she could barely walk.

“I didn’t want to be a 40-year-old with a cane,” she said, “but I was in too much pain to worry about it.” She chose a purple cane that she could fold when not in use.

The Fosters are big live music fans and they went to a few outdoor concerts last summer, but Lauren Foster gave away their remaining tickets after she realized navigating crowds with a cane was too difficult.

It’s not that her time away from the ocean was joyless. The family got a new puppy — a white English lab that joined their 8 1/2-year-old bull mastiff — during Foster’s “indoor year.” Lauren Foster stayed home and watched the dogs while Matt and Lilly were out on the boat. She taught herself to crochet and can now make her own clothes. She taught Lilly how to crochet, too.

New knee, new life

The day after Foster got her new knee, her first challenge was to get out of her hospital bed, use her walker to get to the restroom and then return.

“I did it,” she said. “Very slowly, but I did it.”

Before she could leave the hospital, she had to navigate stairs with her walker — something she was going to have to do once she got home.

She credits her family for helping with her recovery. “My husband and daughter were amazing. My mom came for a week. My mother-in-law helped with rides to and from PT … I needed to ice my knee a lot. I named my ice machine ‘Bernard,’ and I’d holler, ‘Somebody refresh Bernard.’ Everybody knew what that meant.”

She had physical therapy after surgery and declared those results “amazing.”

“I have to give a shout-out to both of my physical therapists: Joe Overby and Alissa Foote. They were hugely encouraging, even on the days I felt I was making zero progress.”

After about two months, Foster graduated from the walker to the old cane, which has since been retired. “I use that sucker for digging stuff out from underneath my bed,” she joked. “I couldn’t let it go. I mean, we've been so close.”

The family was back at the beach recently when a storm came out of nowhere. “We were drenched in minutes,” Foster said, “and I was running through the sand. I couldn’t have done that last year. I would’ve been crawling to the car.”