YANKEE DOODLE DANDY : Don Iovino of Burbank Hooks Into a Fortune With Innovative Doodling Method of Catching Bass

Don Iovino is a professional bass fisherman, and if you want to know just how proficient he is at getting the big-mouthed creatures out of the lake and into his boat, consider this: Later this month he will make his third trip in three years across the ocean to teach the Japanese how to fish.

Teaching Japanese people how to fish?

This is like teaching Southerners how to drive stock cars or conducting a seminar for Eskimos on how to dress warmly. The Japanese are the most prolific consumers of fish in the world. You wouldn’t think they’d need some guy named Don from Burbank to fly halfway around the world to show them how to gather fish.

But they do. And for Iovino, that is success.

And so is winning the U. S. Bass world championship and both divisions of the U. S. Bass Angler of the Year award. And success is also having sold more than 4,000 videotapes on a special method for catching bass. And gathering big money, national sponsorships from such companies as Mercury Marine, Ranger Boats, Trilene line, Phenix rods and Lowrance Electronics.

Iovino, 51, is as comfortable today as a 10-pound bass under a submerged log. And he owes it all to the discovery he made in 1976 on Lake Castaic that all bass don’t spend their entire lives under a log or hiding inside a clump of weeds.

Iovino has hit it big in the world of sportfishing by doodling.

Doodling?

Yes, but this is not the kind of doodling whereby you make ridiculous-looking sketches with your pen while talking on the telephone with someone who is boring you to within a heartbeat of death.

This form of doodling involves enticing bass from the unprotected depths of a lake by waving a plastic worm or other artificial lure in front of their big lips with, by bass-fishing standards, hair-thin line. It was--when Iovino first discovered it and began to perfect it--an unheard of way to catch bass.

At the time, the only accepted method of hauling bass from a lake went something like this: Use line strong enough to not only wrench a bass out from under a submerged log but also to wrench the tree out of the bottom of the lake if necessary.

Using 20- and even 30-pound test line was part of the routine for catching bass that often weighed no more than a pound or two. When big money was involved in tournaments, giving the fish a sporting chance with light line was not a major part of the thinking. The basic idea after a fish struck a lure was to jerk him out of the lake so fast that he would look like a Polaris missile as he broke the surface of the lake.

And the basic approach to enticing the fish was to patrol the shallow, murky coves and whistle giant lures at places where bass like to hide: beneath logs and beside stumps, into the thickest weed patches and densest concentrations of lily pads.

And this system of using clothesline rope tied to lures the size of household pets worked. Most of the time. Because bass do like that kind of cover. And they are very aggressive fish, attacking anything that swims into their territory.

But it didn’t always work, because often the fish weren’t under the logs. Changing weather systems or other disruptions often sent the bass finning for the deep water. And when they went there, all the guys named Bobby Joe Elmer from all the Alabamas in the world couldn’t catch them.

Until Iovino showed them how.

“I’d been fishing for years with my son on Lake Castaic, just for the fun of fishing,” Iovino said. “We fished for trout with nightcrawlers, drifting them deep. And we used to catch bass all the time doing that.

“One day I watched one of those bass guys win a local tournament there with two of the littlest bass I ever saw. We had caught and released about 50 bass the same day. And right then, the light bulb went on. I said, ‘Hell, I can beat that.’ ”

Iovino had watched the bass pros throwing their rat-sized lures against the shoreline all day and coming up with very little besides sore wrists. He knew his technique, the one he discovered quite by accident while trout fishing, was better.

“All those guys had ever learned was throwing that big stuff to the lily pads,” he said.

And he went about perfecting his technique.

First, he found that light line--as light as six-pound test--was required, because bass away from the thick cover of a shoreline were not nearly as aggressive and were easily spooked by the heavier line.

Then, he learned that the bass that hung out in deep water were not just holding randomly in open water. They were congregating around some form of deep cover such as rock piles. So he began using his electronic sonar depth-sounder to find and identify those “humps” on the bottom.

And once he learned how to find those on a regular basis, the bass began hitting the floor of his boat with the same regularity.

The 1984 world championship was the first major affirmation of Iovino’s doodling. Winning the north and south divisions of the Angler of the Year award in 1985 reaffirmed it. Mixed in were five national championships. Iovino has won about $230,000 in the past few years with his doodling technique. But that prize money total is only a fraction of what he expects Don Iovino Products Inc., to generate in the next few years.

Most recently there was the videotape, “Doodling For Bass,” which has begun to rack up major sales across the country in the past few months.

Then there are the actual doodling products, the rods and reels and weights and hooks and plastic worms that he makes. There is a doodling kit containing everything that the first-time doodler needs to try Iovino’s technique. There is the doodling pack that comes with 15 of Iovino’s special worms, five hooks, five sinkers and five orange attracting beads in an aluminum box for a cool $43. He has sold many of them.

“I’ve made myself pretty comfortable from that one day on Lake Castaic, catching bass when I didn’t even want to catch bass,” he said.

And he has come a long way from a day in 1975 when he quit his job as an aircraft mechanic for Sargent Industries, fed up by the corporate head-pounding he was forced to endure.

“Remember that song, ‘Take This Job and Shove It’?” Iovino asked. “Well, that became my theme song. And one day, that’s what I told them. You should have seen the look on my wife’s face when I came home that day and told her what I had done. I had no plan at all for the rest of my life. And you know what she said? She said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll make it.’

“And we did. I’ve created another rat race for myself with the company and all the marketing of my products, but I don’t mind. Because this time, I’m in control of the rat race.

“This time, I’m the main rat.”