Lures of the Wild : How to Make a Million Catching Bass by Computer and Wiggle Wart
In the soft light of a hot desert dawn outside of Las Vegas next Wednesday, 300 men will climb into sleek $15,000 boats. They will fire up 150-horsepower outboard motors, cram their bodies between stacks of tackle boxes and graphite forests of fishing rods and roar across Lake Mead at 70 m.p.h., the wind crushing their sunglasses against their noses and pinning their tongues to the roofs of their mouths should they attempt to speak.
Eventually, they will shut off the massive $5,000 motors, lower electric $400 motors into the warm water and glide silently toward a cove, rock or stump. Using the rod and reel combinations that cost as much as $300, they will begin casting some of the 30,000 lures they have lugged with them. Perhaps a green and yellow Chatter Shad. Or an orange Weed Walker or Weed Walker II. Maybe a chartreuse Clear Lip Wiggle Wart will do the trick.
They will do all of this because they want to catch a few bass at the 1986 U.S. Bass-sponsored U.S. Open. To professional bass fishermen, this is Mecca. This tournament is the scale-covered equivalent of baseball’s World Series, football’s Super Bowl and Tom Lasorda’s Thanksgiving dinner. It is big .
And it all seems pretty ridiculous. Right up until the moment when you are told that the winner, based on total weight of the fish caught during the four-day tournament, gets $50,000 and the fisherman who catches the heaviest bass each day wins a $20,000 boat.
Human nature being what it is, and $50,000 being what it is, it is not surprising at all to learn that these guys pursue largemouth bass in a bug-eyed, frenzied carnival of technology.
Among the favorites to catch the biggest fish and win the biggest bucks is Rich Tauber of Woodland Hills, a 10-year veteran of the pro bass circuit.
Tauber, 28, admits that the pros sometimes carry things to an extreme when it comes to fishing tackle. “Maybe we all have an excess of equipment,” he said. “Maybe it’s gotten out of hand.”
Let’s take a look:
Rods--First there was bamboo, which broke when you closed the car door on it. Next came fiberglass, which didn’t break when you closed the car door on it. It shattered. Then came boron, which most fishermen previously thought was a word to describe a guy who left an open tackle box full of hooks on your boat seat. And now we have graphite, which is described in several fishing magazines--in 1986--as a “space-age material.” You figure these guys are still hoping for a successful return of Sputnik? The new rods can cost as much as $200.
Reels--You figure a reel with a FASTCAST self-centering bail system, 750-degree Dura-smooth rear drag, ball-bearing drive and brass pinion gear would be enough. But no. Not for these guys. They apparently needed a computerized reel, one with a battery and full graphic display screen on it that provides you with a digital read-out of the distance of your cast, the depth and distance of your last strike and the speed that you are dragging the lure back to the boat and a bar graph that shows how quickly your lure is sinking. Can a new model that also gets the Atlanta Braves’ home games be far off?
Line--Dacron wasn’t good enough. Apparently, monofilament wasn’t good enough. So now there’s a cofilament line, with a polyester core surrounded by a nylon shell. Advertisements compare it to other fishing lines with a chart showing: “Stress transmitted by wet lines in kilopounds per square inch (Kpsi),” one says. “Stress at 10% elongation in thousand pounds/in.2.” It is highly unlikely that many fishermen know what any of that means. Most of them do know, however, that even this line will snap if you fire a lure into a tree and yank on it too hard.
Lures--There is indeed a Clear Lip Wiggle Wart. It looks like a minnow. There is a Danc’n Eel. And a Sonic Rooster Tail. And a Creek Chub Wigglefish. There are lures that look like shad, a small bait fish. One is the Chatter Shad. Another is a Texas Shad, which presumably is similar to the Chatter Shad but wears boots and drives a Cadillac. But they need all these lures. These guys change lures like Elizabeth Taylor changes husbands.
If all of the lures don’t help you find the fish, perhaps a few blasts of sonar would help. Sonar that bounces off the bottom of a lake and reports back to a graph recorder, showing the depth of the water, the presence or non-presence of fish and the size of the fish. Newer models use body density readings from the fish to indicate the species of fish that is not biting your lure under your boat.
But Tauber says there is a reason for all of this.
“I still like to fish sometimes with one rod, walking the bank of a pond. I still like fishing the primitive way,” he said. “But I also know that our sport is now very high-tech and very advanced. But when it comes right down to it, all the electric trolling motors and graphite rods are not going to put fish in the boat. All that stuff helps, but when you boil it all down, it’s still a man against a fish.”
For this battle, Tauber will arm himself with eight fully rigged rods and reels, 10 spare rods and 10 or 15 spare reels, 80 or 90 lures, a few thousand artificial worms, 200 hooks and 200 sinkers. This is culled from a basement collection that includes about 50 reels, more than 100 rods, an estimated 20,000 plastic worms and 200 lures and spools containing enough fishing line to stretch halfway around the world or the length of Manute Bol.
“I’ve brought all this stuff with me for a tournament and caught all my fish on one rod and one lure,” he said. “That’s fine. But on those other days, on the days when the fish aren’t hitting the usual lures in the usual way, then you have to try everything until you find the secret. That’s why you need to have everything in the boat, every lure, every possible combination of things. Because if you can’t find the secret, if the secret isn’t in the boat with you, then you lose. The guy that finds the secret gets $50,000.”
Couldn’t an angler just borrow a lure he needs from his tournament fishing partner? Forget it. A person would have a better chance of successfully borrowing Mr. T’s necklaces.
“If my partner is catching his fish on a gold minnow lure and I don’t have one, I don’t care if he has 50 of them in his box, he’s not giving me one. That’s his money we’re fishing for. So I better have that lure, whatever it is, in my tackle box.”
He usually does. Tauber won the 1982 U.S. Open at Lake Mead and is the No. 2 all-time money winner in tournaments held at that lake. He was the 1984 U.S. Bass national champion and is a five-time qualifier for the Tournament of Champions. He is one of the most highly successful participants in this highly specialized sport. He has pulled in an estimated $100,000 annually for the past few years in tournament earnings and equipment manufacturers’ contracts.
“I fished for the first time at Lake Irvine in Orange County at the age of 9, and I loved it,” he said. “I started bass fishing a year later at Lake Cachuma and loved it even more. When I found out I could make a living at it, that’s all I needed to hear.
“Now, it’s a completely different feeling than it was at age 9. I don’t kid myself about that. This is my job now, and my enjoyment of the sport is different. Now, my enjoyment comes in the hour after a big tournament when I’m standing around, outdoors, sunburned, waiting for them to start cutting up the money and knowing that I’m getting the biggest cut.”
In his contracts with manufacturers, which includes a line of rods and reels, a boat manufacturer, a line company, a brand of outboard motors, a brand of lures and dozens of other products, Tauber is required to attend speaking engagements at fishing and outdoors shows and before private fishing clubs and other sports organizations.
“I fish in tournaments about 100 days a year and I make appearances for my manufacturers about 100 days a year,” he said. “Add the days it takes traveling to and from those things, and I do not have much free time. Between Dec. 26 and May 1 of this year I was home in Woodland Hills for a total of nine days. But that has been my choice. I want to be in both the fishing world and the corporate world. I have to be able to stand in a board room in a suit and tie and also sit on a dock with a guy who’s spitting tobacco juice on me. I am a liaison between the tackle manufacturers--many of whom don’t fish--and the real fishermen. I can’t be too city and I can’t be too country.”
In recent years, bass fishing tournaments have been marred by cheating. Last year, for example, a man brought a monstrous bass to the scales. The fish was a Florida-bred strain of bass which lives only in that state. The tournament, however, was in Texas. Officials apparently did not believe that the fish hitchhiked the 1,000 miles to a new lake and they disqualified the man. Adding to the family’s woes was the fact that the man’s brother was also disqualified when he entered the second biggest fish, which was, strangely enough, the only other Florida bass brought to the weigh-in that day.
But the tournaments in which cheating have played a role have not been sponsored by U.S. Bass or any other recognized fishing association.
“Those tournaments are one-day deals, biggest fish wins,” Tauber said. “We call them radio tournaments because they’re usually sponsored by some local station. Those tournaments have nothing to do with pro bass fishing. In 10 years of tournament fishing, I have never, ever seen a single example of cheating. It is, at this level, a very honest sport.”
And it is not a sport, Tauber contends, that is based on luck. For those of you who do think that 90% of fishing is just plain luck and 10% is some other form of luck, Tauber has this general message: May a treble hook become lodged in your scalp.
“I think the No. 1 thing that makes a pro bass fisherman is that the ability to catch fish is a gift,” he said. “It’s an actual God-given gift, just like being a musician or an artist. It’s not luck at all. To be able to see a lake and understand it, to be able to see the conditions and understand right away what it will take to catch fish consistently, every day, that’s a natural gift. I’ve been on lakes with too many 60-year-old guys with 40 years of fishing experience and I beat them all the time. So it can’t be just experience. You can teach fishing to a certain point, but some of it has to be natural.”
And some of it, perhaps most of it, is the ability to drag yourself out of a warm bed and into a cold or rainy or snowy or windy environment at 4 a.m. every day.
“So much of my success is because of determination,” Tauber said. “The determination to fish all the time, even when you don’t want to, and the determination to stand in that boat for eight hours and never sit down and never stop casting and never stop fishing for four straight days. Most people don’t have that determination.”
And, Tauber said, much of the lure of tournament fishing is in the species being sought. He has not, for example, entered a carp tournament.
“It’s the fish, the bass, that gets me going,” he said. “The bass is a natural predator. He’s the meanest guy in the lake. He lives in the bushes and the rocks and the weeds and you’ve got to go in and get him. He’s always looking for a fight.
“Other people love trout fishing. Bass eat trout.”
And because of his success, Tauber eats very well.
“I guess I make between $85,000 and $100,000 a year,” he said, “but I’m not overpaid. If I put this much time and energy and effort into something else, I’d be a millionaire by now.
“But then again, I wouldn’t be fishing, would I?”