She Is Star in a Cast of Millions

The thing about Judy Pachner is, she’s so small that when she has a fish on the line it’s hard to tell which one of them is hooked. Who is trying to land whom.

You’ve heard of the Nantucket sleigh ride? That was a harpooned whale taking a longboat on a merry chase up and down the ocean till the mother ship could bring the whale safely to gaff. Moby Dick took off Captain Ahab’s leg on one of those.

Judy can take a Nantucket sleigh ride with a 12-pound bass. She is under limit. She says she is 5 feet, but you know how fishermen exaggerate. She says she weighs 90 pounds, but that sounds like another fish story. The reason she’s so successful is the fish think she’s one of them.

Judy once caught 500 fish in a little more than an hour and a half, thus tying a record set by a great white shark in the shoals of Tasmania and Orson Welles in a restaurant on the Champs Elysees in 1950.

Judy caught hers in a mill pond in Illinois, and the reason she caught so many so fast was that she was trying to stock her own pond with them at 25 cents a head. Judy doesn’t normally catch more than she can eat--which, by the way, is more than you would think given her barely visible silhouette. She’s the best argument for a fish diet this side of a barracuda.

Judy is the Sam Snead of her sport, fly fishing.

Now, in the pecking order of people who go down to the sea with hip boots and creel, the fly fisherman is considered the elite. He, or she, considers all other forms of fish-catching crude. It’s not enough to catch a fish, you have to outsmart it. What you do is drop an object made out of feathers, furs, nylon and thread on top of the water where the fish are so that to them it looks exactly like a feeding insect.

To do this with any success, you have to be standing 40 or 50 feet away and yet drop the ersatz insect within inches of where you want it to land. No one does this any better than Judy Pachner. It has been said she could drop a lure through a keyhole at 50 yards. She once spent an entire sportsman’s show flipping cigarettes out of a blindfolded helper’s mouth. “It wasn’t hard,” she said. “The cigarette is an inch and a half long.”

Fishing is often widely held to be the sport of the indolent, the alcoholic.

“Too poor for polo, too proud for pool,” is the way one anti-fisherman summed up the typical angler.

“Cruelty disguised as a sport,” writer Jimmy Cannon once fumed. “The vice of the shirker and the rummy.” An alibi, not a sport, he sniffed.

But Judy is no six-pack, card-deck, weekend fisherman. Fishing is not an excuse to get away from the office. Fishing is the office.

The daughter of a man once named outdoorsman of the year, Judy had a rod in her hand about the time most children still have rattles and teething rings. And she has never been one to go about fishing in a $100,000 boat with a padded swivel chair, a crew of seven and a radar scope to track the fish schools.

Judy goes fishing for the same reason men climb mountains. She has never mounted a catch in her life. Her father once promised her he would have a catch stuffed, provided it was over 10 pounds, which would have been a record for the water she fished. Judy caught one 9 pounds 3/4 ounce, still a record but under the standard the stubborn Leo Pachner had posted. He would not relent. They ate the fish.

A fly fisherman who has never caught a trout is as rare as a wolf who has never caught a rabbit, but Judy prefers to cast in the sluggish streams of the Midwest, where the quarry is perch, walleye, bluegill and bass. Anybody can go up to the Arctic Circle streams and fill a cannery in an afternoon with a string and a cork and a worm, but the fish in the Kankakee are street-wise, Judy says.

Even they are surprised, though, to be fooled by a slip of a girl who looks as if she had just come up on tricycle. Judy is so tiny she can’t even find wading boots to fit. You could put all of her in one boot.

But it’s her other form that captivates most fishermen. Not the 34-22-34, but the backswing, follow-through and weight shift. It’s like watching Ted Williams attack a curveball.

A cast has to be long and accurate, and the fly has to land on the water as delicately as a butterfly--like a Gene Littler 9-iron on a green. Anything less and it’s beans for dinner again while the fish go for real flies.

Judy’s form will be on display at the annual Sportfishing Show at the Long Beach Convention Center starting next Wednesday, where she will give a seminar daily. You’ll have no trouble recognizing her. She looks like something you would throw back, the only fisherman in the world who has to climb the pole to bait the hook. But when she gets through, there will be fish on the end of it.