Making a Pitch to Catch Bass : Professional Bass Fishermen Pass On Secrets of Their Trade to Dedicated Amateur Anglers in Traveling Hotel Classroom at Woodland Hills

Seminars are nothing new to the lavish Warner Center Marriott. General Motors, Lockheed, Prudential Insurance and Rocketdyne have all conducted business beneath its glittering chandeliers in recent weeks. But there was something different about Thursday night’s seminar in plush Salon E. Something that you just couldn’t put your finger on.

Well, you could have put your finger on it. But it would have bled when you tried to pull the barb out.

Gathered were neither rocket scientists nor auto makers. Filling--and in some cases over-filling--160 chairs were bass fishermen. And there is no creature in all of the outdoors that pursues his quarry with the dedication and fanaticism of a bass fisherman. They had reached deep into their pockets, past the chewing tobacco and beat-up Swiss Army knives, and pulled out $15 each for the right to hear three hours’ worth of bass-catching theory and technique from three professional bass fishermen.

They came from Van Nuys and Woodland Hills and Reseda, but they also came from San Pedro and Long Beach and Lancaster. And they all came for the same reason: to learn how to catch more and bigger bass.

Except for Jeff Brandt of Lancaster, who drove 150 miles.

“I like to fish and all,” Brandt said. “But really, how much of an excuse do you need to want to get out of Lancaster for a night?”

The lecturers were Rich Tauber of Woodland Hills, Greg Hines of Mesa, Ariz., and Gary Klein of Oroville, Calif., young men who have made vast amounts of money fishing in pro bass tournaments across the nation. The topics? Surface plugs. Crankbaits. Spinnerbaits. Worms. Flippin’ and pitchin’.

And polar bears.

“On this lure, I always tie polar bear hair to the last hook,” Tauber told the crowd.

“Rich,” asked a man in a somewhat plaid shirt. “How’d you catch the polar bear?”

“I fished in a tournament up north,” Tauber replied. “Way up north.”

But mostly, this was a serious crowd. If these guys had wanted a night of laughs, they would have stayed home and crushed beer cans on their foreheads. What kind of a crowd was it? Well, see if this helps:

One of the bass pros suggested casting a lure near a cat and watching the animal’s reaction as the lure was twitched. Bass react much the same, he said. He quickly pointed out, however, that you should take the needle-sharp hooks off the lure lest you snag the cat’s cute little face. At this point, a general buzz began. The men were talking and laughing. The consensus seemed to be that they would, if it was all the same with the lecturer, rather leave the hooks on during the game with the cat.

It was that kind of crowd. A lot of cowboy boots. A lot of hats. Hats that stayed snugly upon their owners’ heads throughout the three-hour seminar.

Those without hats displayed hair that seemed to fall into one of two appearance categories: expensively styled at a hair specialty shop, or inexpensively styled by walking too close to a spinning outboard motor prop.

There was also a lot of club affiliation paraphernalia. Bowling shirts and windbreakers with with “West Valley Bass” or “amBASSadeurs” stitched onto them.

Outside Salon E was the Marriott gift shop. In a glass case sat a sterling silver necklace with a $250 price tag, along with other expensive jewelry. It was all still there at the end of the night.

“No,” the gift shop cashier said, “they didn’t come in for any jewelry. But they bought a lot of cigarettes.”

Inside the Salon, Tauber, Hines and Klein spoke about and demonstrated sure-fire, bass-catching methods. Some of the fishermen took notes. One held a tape recorder near his head, sort of aimed at the speakers, for three hours. A few of the guests looked terribly bored.

Those were the women.

One, who appeared to have accompanied her husband only under the threat of death, leaned her face in her hands most of the night and yawned a lot. This evening ranked right up there, her face seemed to indicate, with the night her husband straggled home at 2 a.m. with pool-table chalk on his hands and a piece of pepperoni pizza stuck to the side of his head.

During the lectures, several fishing rods swayed in the climate-controlled air. At the end of one of the rods was a giant, hairy-looking thing, later identified as a spinnerbait. At first glance it looked like something you would crush with a shoe if you caught it in your house. Upon closer inspection, however, it looked like something you would crush with a boot if you caught it in your house.

With this lure, it was pointed out, Hines has won tens of thousands of dollars in recent years.

Another rod was attached to a lure called a crankbait. No one seemed to know why it was called a crankbait, but all had giant plastic lips that cause them to wobble in the water. Crankbaits would seem then to be defined as follows: Any lure with lips.

The third offering was a surface plug. It floats and drives bass crazy, causing them to--and this is the word of one of the pros--”explode” at the surface. That’s nice. Seems like you could get pretty much the same result, though, using a few well-placed sticks of dynamite just under the lake’s surface. And at the same time avoid all that arm-wearying casting.

There was a long discussion about bass spawning. Hines said that for a bass, three factors cause the urge to spawn: longer hours of daylight, full moons, and water temperature.

Contrary to the popular myth, male bass do not indicate an urge to spawn by rolling down the window in their car and yelling AAAAAOOOHHHHHH!! at the top of their gills as they pass a group of female bass.

People jotted down notes as Hines spoke of the importance of replacing factory eyelets and hooks on lures with custom equipment. He called this “tuning up your crankbaits.”

“Tune up those crankbaits,” he warned. “Nothing’s worse than crankbaits that aren’t tuned up.”

Or at least not much worse. How many times have we been embarrassed by having someone pull up alongside us on the freeway, lean out of his window and bellow, “Hey, buddy. Your crankbait. Tune it up!”

Hines also had this to say about spinnerbaits: “The best of them have skirts.”

This was a reference to strips of plastic or rubber that are often attached to a lure’s hooks. But the crowd began buzzing. Smirking, actually. And nudging each other with elbows. The group of fishermen seemed to be in general agreement here that the best of anything have skirts.

The hours passed remarkably fast. As the seminar ended, Hines watched the blue-jeaned, cigarette-smoking fishermen file out of Salon E, through the garish hotel lobby and back to the parking lot, where many of them climbed into pickup trucks. And he didn’t flinch.

“So many people love to fish, especially for bass,” he said. “A setting like this, in a hotel like this, that’s nice. A lot of doctors and lawyers love to fish, you know. Doctors and lawyers would love to be out on the lake five days a week.”

And they probably would be, too, if golf wasn’t so darn time-consuming.