Invasion of the Bass Catchers
Something about the the glint of metal-flake in the morning must do to men what it supposedly does to bigmouth bass. The explosion of red, green and gold sparks in a pickup’s headlights must ignite predatory instincts deep in the primitive brain; blot out common sense; trigger a tightly focused competitive frenzy.
That’s one of my theories, anyway, as I loiter in a parking lot beside Lake Perris, looking for some guy named Walker--Jerry Jeff? Johnny?--my blind-date partner in this tournament for the seemingly insane.
Already, out on the black water, a couple of 200-horsepower outboards gurgle eagerly. Most of the glittery bass boats, however, are still trailered. Their owners putter with expensive electronic gear or cluster in a circle of light spilling from an old motor home.
Inside the RV, a man and woman work at two laptop computers, checking in anglers, assessing their fees and collecting for the intricate side bets--”Easy Money,” “Big Fish,” “Double Down”--that make competitive bass fishing the weird amalgam of compulsions it has become. * It doesn’t take long for my partner to spot me. Jimmy Walker, a pleasant, 33-year-old San Diego County Sheriff’s detective is the part-time pro the organizers have roped into shepherding the outsider. “These are some of the best sticks going,” he says, assessing the milling competitors. I smile, not sure what to say.
A couple weeks earlier I had talked with the head of a Redondo Beach-based group called American Bass. I told him I was doing a story on Southern California’s unlikely reputation as the home of huge lunker bass and asked how I could check out a tournament. He said only competitors were allowed on the lake, but that he’d be happy to find me a partner. “I don’t have a clue about bass fishing,” I admitted. “No problem!” he replied. Only later did I learn that hooking the press this way has been a key secret behind bass fishing’s peculiar All-American success story--a story a lot of folks would love to retell here in Southern California.
The next world record bass, you see, may well come from a lake within 100 miles of Los Angeles. It could, all things considered, be worth a million dollars. And that scaly grail is just a sideshow to tournament bass fishing, a big-bucks carnival that is making more and more otherwise-rational Californians lose all sight of the line between simple recreation and a calling.
But none of this made a lick of sense to me until I met Bertha.
Bass are not native to California but come exclusively from the waters spilling off the Mississippi River. The largemouth species probably migrated westward as nervous fingerlings, jiggling along in tin cans shipped by rail to sportsmen who had relocated from other parts. Half a century later, researchers identified a distinct subspecies of largemouth black bass being caught by anglers in America’s South. In the 1960s, the California Department of Fish and Game planted San Diego County’s Upper Otay Lake with this hefty “Florida” strain. In all likelihood, Bertha descended from that branch of the largemouth family tree.
But genetics alone doesn’t explain her or her increasingly common kind.
If a fish could have a self-image, Bertha’s undoubtedly would have a lot more to do with her role as predator than prey. Bass are masters of the ambush. Well camouflaged, they hunker down until a victim--bluegill, trout, worm, mouse, fellow bass--happens by, then lunge at 30 or maybe even 35 miles an hour. Slurp. With just a flash of effort, the fit get fitter on the energy of the vanquished.
For some 11 years, Bertha survived this underwater jungle. Growing bigger and more dangerous, she patrolled ever-widening turf, possibly circling the entirety of 2,200-acre Lake Perris in a day, before returning to a nook some call Rock Climbers’ Cove. She was prowling this shadowy, sun ray-streaked kingdom in January when an aluminum boat with two booms extending from its bow appeared overhead.
Mike Giusti, a biologist with the California State Department of Fish and Game, watched his depth finder. When it said he was in eight feet of water, he hit a switch. The booms sent a low-amperage charge sizzling through the water. Bertha never saw the electric body-slam coming. Her muscles convulsed. Her pea-sized brain jolted. And within seconds she was belly up, floating toward the sky.
“Oh, my God,” Giusti thought as the fish surfaced. The Lake Perris record was 16.2 pounds. Giusti pulled out his digital scale and measured: 17.75. With luck, if she could live to the ripe bass age of 15, this fish, Giusti knew, might well contend for the world record.
That evening, Giusti gently hefted the fish into a tank and drove her, along with dozens of smaller bass and bluegill, to the Anaheim Convention Center, where the Great Western Sports, RV & Travel Show was about to open. By midnight, Bertha was swimming in Buck Potter’s Bass Bin, a 39-foot-long, 3,200-gallon aquarium on wheels that the Missouri-based Potter and his wife pull from state to state, show to show.
“We’ve had people drive 200 miles to see that fish,” Potter said a few days later. “Even if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool bass fisherman, that’s something you could go your whole life and never see.”
If Bertha could have seen beyond her tank’s reflective walls, she, too, might have marveled. A few feet away, manufacturers displayed their bass boats, the hyper-specialized vessels that have evolved to compensate for humankind’s declining predatory skills.
In 1995, Californians spent an estimated $116 million on these low-slung babies, with their electronic depth gauges, fish finders, aerated holding tanks, high-horsepower outboards and enough metal-flake to make baby boomers recall their first Schwinn Sting Ray. But why would a firefighter, lawyer or Denny’s manager sink up to $30,000 in a two-seat bass boat (15-year financing available)? Ask a former Alabama insurance salesman named Ray Wilson Scott Jr.
Back in the ‘60s, government hydroelectric dams were turning swatches of the riparian South into the kind of stump-filled lakes and reservoirs that make bass happy. That, of course, made bass fishermen happy, too. But bass fishermen are a unique subspecies. Many quickly outgrew their trout-hunting brethren’s contentment with fishing’s simple, Zen-like pleasures. Tournaments popped up wherever bass chased lures. Cheating followed.
Scott took note of all that and, in 1967, organized a contest on Arkansas’ Beaver Lake with rules designed to preclude corruption. The next year, he founded the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society--B.A.S.S. And in 1971, he invited 25 of the nation’s top outdoor writers to fish side by side with some of the budding sport’s self-styled “pros.” His strategy worked.
Here’s what the BASS Masters Classic looked like last year: A police escort for 40 identical new bass boats pulled by new pickups; 23,000 screaming fans in an auditorium for the weigh-in; a $100,000 check for the winner, along with endorsement and promotion deals that could add another $1 million.
For much of bass fishing’s brief history, it tended to be a Good Ole Boy Southern deal. But now, with more than 60 televised fishing shows running in weekend blocks nationwide, the sport is taking root everywhere.
As it happens, Southern California’s relatively warm, nutrient-rich lakes have turned out to be bass habitat par excellence. They are generally too dinky to support the high-powered armadas that the bigger tournaments pour onto lakes often 100 miles or more in length. But smaller contests abound. And neither Ray Scott, who sold B.A.S.S. in 1986, nor Ann Lewis, the fishing-publishing-promotional conglomerate’s current spokesperson, will rule out putting the more exclusive--and most heavily hyped--BASS Masters Classic on a Southern California lake some day.
If that happens, it will be, at least in part, because the sport’s Big Dogs can’t ignore Southern California’s Big Fish--even though obsessing on record-size lunkers is generally frowned upon as a lowly bait-angler’s vice. Still, the state’s lakes keep pumping ‘em out, in part because of what the state Department of Fish and Game keeps pumping in--rainbow trout. “Those lakes are like feed lots,” says Scott, a touch of disdain in his voice.
In 1980, an angler hauled a 21.2-pound bass from Lake Casitas near Ojai--the closest anyone has come to the record 22.01-pounder caught in Georgia in 1932. In 1991, a Castaic angler reeled in a 21.12-pounder. Experts now predict that the next record lunker will be caught in Casitas or Castaic Lake; San Diego County’s Lake Hodges or San Vicente; Lake Isabella, near Bakersfield . . . or maybe even Riverside County’s own Lake Perris.
*
In Anaheim, as he stands staring into his Bass Bin, Buck Potter recalls people’s reaction when they heard where his big fish had been nabbed: “Lake Perris? Where there’s all those skiers and jet skis?”
Potter grins. “If Bertha gets any bigger, she’ll be eating jet skis.”
For her part, Bertha maintains her aura of authority, ignoring Potter and the army of professional anglers who ascend a platform at one end of the aquarium to try to make her strike. Every sort of lure hits the water: crazy legs and dinky bugs, beaver-tail grubs and crank’n shad. The anglers try all the esoteric tricks the books and videos and TV hosts recommend: crawlin’, shakin’n bakin’, flippin’, twitchin’, jerkin’, rippin’, poppin’, chuggin’, buzzin’ and doodlin’.
“We’ve had the best in the West out here, with no luck,” Potter says. One evening, as the show nears its end, Carol Martens, one of competitive bass fishing’s 2% female contingent and eight-time ABA team angler of the year, gives it a shot.
On one side of the tank, spectators sit in aluminum bleachers. On the other, men and women lean forward on folding chairs. Martens’ hand-poured, pink plastic worm slips into the tank and twitches before the bass. Kids with yellow headbands and plastic feathers given out by a hunting lodge step closer to the glass and point.
Now and then, a two- or three-pounder hits, taking the hookless plastic in its mouth and hanging on as Martens reels it across the tank. But Bertha remains aloof. The worm lands in front of her. She swims past. It plops onto her snout. She turns away. What does entice her is a live bluegill, and she edges up behind the fish and begins a slow, patient stalk.
“We lost seven bluegill the first night, nine the next,” Potter says. “If you’re a five-ounce fish in a tank with an 18-pound fish, life sucks.”
In fact, Bertha’s jut-jawed mouth could accommodate a Chihuahua puppy, and the bluegill seems to know it. The little fish’s scales shimmer as it slips into some weeds. Bertha follows. Her black eyes, flecked with gold around the rims and partially fogged by cataracts, roll like radar. Her pale white belly twitches. As if in slow motion, the gap between Bertha and the bluegill narrows. Then, for reasons that clearly have nothing to do with mercy, Bertha fins off in the other direction, her pink tongue throbbing obscenely.
Two nights later, Giusti returns the big fish and her surviving companions to the lake from which they came.
Lake Perris is still devoid of morning color when what looks like a fish wobbles across the sky.
“There’s Joe,” Jimmy Walker says, pointing to Joe Uribe, a Hughes Aircraft satellite technician who has decided to spend the entire daylong tournament hurling and hurling and hurling an 18-inch slab of blubbery, sparkly plastic--a “Castaic” trout imitator--into the lake.
Like most of our 180 or so opponents, we are trying a more conservative approach. Eschewing such an obvious bid for a lunker bass, we’re going after our combined four-fish limit with smaller lures. Even this, though, will prove a challenge, as Southern California’s prime bass fishing usually begins in March or April, when the water temperature hits 60 and fish like Bertha move into shallow spawning water.
On our boat, Jimmy works from the bow, steering with a foot pedal while continuously casting and keeping an eye on the fish finder, depth gauge and digitized dials displaying the water temperature: 54.4 . . . 54.5
I cast a purple worm until I get a tangle. Jimmy reaches into a bin beneath the carpeted floorboards and hands me another of his 15 fully rigged graphite, boron and graphite-boron rods. This time I cast a leech imitator with the texture of Gummi Bears and metal-flake accents into the dark lake.
Within a 200-yard radius, a dozen or so bass boats bob, but between-boat communication seldom exceeds a nod or wave. When conversation does break out between the more gregarious anglers, it tends to go like this:
“What’cha throwin’?”
“Watermelon wienies.”
Few of the anglers at this Lake Perris Team Tournament have much chance of breaking into the big time--of fishing, say, the BASS Masters Classic or picking up a $200,000 yearly stipend from a boat company. But most would probably chuck their jobs for the pro circuit in a flash. Jimmy, for his part, has come farther than most, having picked up a few partial sponsorships (Precision Plastics and Diversified Marine Electric), some $1,000 and $2,000 prizes and a $5,000 payday with his father as teammate.
Even now, with his human handicap, he fishes intently and, after three hours on the lake, gets a decent 15-inch keeper that he plops into the boat’s electronically aerated holding tank. Minutes later, the tip of my rod dips.
“Put some lumber into it,” Jimmy instructs, and I jerk back. A bass breaks the surface. Unfortunately, what proves to be the entirety of my luck is not big enough to keep.
By noon, I’m bored witless. What is with these guys, I wonder, as I watch the endless repetition of cast and reel, cast and reel. To pass time, I start to pay attention. The typical bass lake is no High Sierra beauty; this one has Riverside’s suburban sprawl edging in. But a sufficiently tight focus changes one’s perspective. I stare at the point where monofilament line connects me to the lake’s surface. Ripples reflect the green fuzz of the surrounding hills, the gray sky. The occasional gull squawks nearby. My subconscious, meanwhile, scans below the surface, where beasts stalk the liquid shadows, oblivious to their proper place in the food chain.
“We’ll have to get going soon,” Jimmy says, and I awaken to time and the fact that the contest is almost over. I realize my boredom faded long ago. Each cast, now, is desperate. Come on, Bertha! Look at the pretty sparkles. Then Jimmy hits a button, and the trolling motor lifts itself from the water. I sigh and sit down. The boat rises up. And in an instant we’re skipping across the lake at 60 mph, one of 30 boats in our “flight” converging like missiles on the same bull’s-eye.
At the parking-lot weigh-in, anglers scoop fish from their tanks as an announcer calls out the weights. Ninety-two teams have caught only 198 fish. A local teacher and his partner have won, bringing in four fish totaling 10.87 pounds. They split $3,170. Runners-up brought in another few thousand dollars in prizes, at least covering their $110-per-team entry fee plus another $100 or so in “options.” Our consolation? Unlike more than a few other teams, at least we caught a keeper--we didn’t “blank.”
A Fish and Game aide stands on a pontoon boat, taking notes on every fish. Some came in with bloated bladders, so he jabs a needle into their flesh, listens as the gas escapes and lowers them into a pH-balanced bin; before the speeches are over, the fish are back in the lake.
This modern loop in nature’s cycle begins anew: Men sharpen hooks and polish metal flake, and Bertha’s cold eyes scan the shadows.