He’s Hoping for Classic Finish

Ishama Monroe once won a bass-fishing tournament with a single cast -- one heck of a cast because it resulted in his hooking two fish on the same lure during the same retrieve.

The two-pound and four-pound largemouth bass, which ended up on separate barbs of Monroe’s treble hook, provided all the weight he needed to clinch victory at the Lake Mohave event.

The 29-year-old pro from Patterson, Calif., uses this story to illustrate how luck sometimes plays a role in the success of the angler.

What he doesn’t have to explain is that luck played no role in his ascending to the greatest heights a bass fisherman can attain. Monroe, on the strength of two top-10 and six top-25 finishes this season, ended up in a tie for 18th place on the CITGO Bassmaster Tour, which easily qualified him for the prestigious Bassmaster Classic, which will be held Aug. 1-3 on the Louisiana Delta.

“The Classic is considered the Super Bowl of bass fishing -- there’s nothing bigger,” Monroe said in a telephone interview this week. “There’s no bigger accomplishment than winning it, but you can’t win unless you make it into the field.”

By making the field of 61, he becomes the first African American fisherman to qualify for the Classic through the pro ranks and only the second ever to qualify. Alfred Williams of Mississippi qualified as an amateur in 1983.

Several black fishermen have competed on the Bassmaster tour, but Monroe was the only one to do so this past season. He’s hoping to set an example for others, however.

“I just want kids to believe they can do anything they want to as long as they set their minds to it,” Monroe said. “But nothing is given to you. You have to earn it.”

Winning the Classic, and the $200,000 top prize, would help his cause.

But Monroe knows that’s going to require luck as well as the skill he has acquired since watching his first tournament when he was 10.

“At that point I said, ‘I want to do this,’ ” he said. “I went to boat shows and sportsmen’s shows and started talking to sponsors, and they told me the kind of person they were looking for was someone who could speak well and communicate with the public.”

With this information, Monroe buckled down in high school, then went to business school, then to college “where I took public speaking and marketing.”

Today, his career as a pro fisherman seems secure enough, and Monroe sounds like any other working stiff when asked about his job.

“It’s not even close to being fun anymore,” he said matter-of-factly. “I spend 200 days on the road, staying at hotels, going to meetings with corporations, and driving and driving. Sometimes I think all we really are are glorified truck drivers.”

But he was quick to point out that he has no regrets. “Every morning I wake up and find that my office is in the outdoors on a lake,” he said. “I don’t have to sit at a desk behind a computer, and I don’t work 9 to 5. Every day offers something different.”

Asked if race has been an issue on the fiercely competitive pro circuits, he said it seemed to be more of an issue in his early days, and particularly in tournaments in the Western United States, which might seem odd. In the Deep South, where bass fishing is almost as popular as NASCAR racing, he can’t recall a single incident.

“The guys were on me when I was younger, like they’re on all the young fishermen,” said Monroe, who has been fishing competitively since he was 16. “But now that I’m older and have been fishing for a while, the guys have been great. There are always some bad apples, but I’d say that 99% of the guys on the tour are great.”

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Is Mike Wurm inching closer to a Classic title? The 50-year-old Arkansas pro, recognized more for his name than for his success, had one of his strongest seasons in 2003. He remained in the top 10 throughout most of the campaign, finishing seventh in the final standings.

“I view myself as being one step away from the upper echelon,” he said. “I think I’m recognized as a consistent angler who is consistently in the money [and] consistently in the top 10 at the end of the year. But I have yet to win a big one, and I think that’s the one step I really need to make.”

*

Aaron Martens of Castaic, the Southland’s lone representative in the Classic the past two years, had a rough season and didn’t qualify this year.

However, he’s hardly complaining after winning the recent FLW Tour’s Forrest Wood Open at Wheeler Lake in Alabama -- and the top prize of $200,000.

Martens’ triumph was not without worry, however. On the last day of the event he was cited for fishing without a license, but was pleased to learn that the FLW Tour, unlike the Bassmaster Tour, has no rule requiring anglers to carry valid licenses.

Martens reportedly told the warden he had purchased a license but misplaced it.

This is the same angler who arrived three minutes late for a Classic weigh-in and was disqualified from third to eighth place -- costing him $9,500 in prize money.

The fine for his latest gaffe won’t lighten his wallet.

Fishing

* Freshwater: Eastern Sierra fishermen will be happy to know that the spring runoff has finally subsided and that water clarity has vastly improved. From Sierra Drifters guide Tom Loe: “As the summer progresses most fisheries, except the tail waters, will begin to see receding flows and improving wading conditions.” Holiday-heavy DFG and Alpers trout plants were made this week.

* Saltwater: The cost of fishing appears to be going up. The Department of Fish and Game has proposed a series of increases likely to become law Jan. 1. One will boost the base cost of a one-day license by $2, from $6.25 to $8.25. That’s better than what the DFG had originally proposed: the outright elimination of one-day licenses.

Additionally, ocean-only licenses, which this year sell for $17.25, will be eliminated. And the cost for the mandatory ocean enhancement stamp will increase from $2.50 to $3.50. So, saltwater and freshwater anglers will have to buy a general license at a cost of $31.25 (up from the current price of $29.25). And ocean anglers can add to that the cost of the enhancement stamp.

Those buying one-day licenses do not need an enhancement stamp.

Hunting

Hunters who applied for California’s big-game draw can check the results online at www.dfg.ca.gov. In all, 91,856 hunters applied for deer, antelope, elk and bighorn sheep tags. The DFG issued 16,428 deer tags (there were 47,703 applicants), 247 antelope tags (14,470), 258 elk tags (21,739), and nine bighorn tags (7,944).

Sailing

Today is the second of three staggered starts of the 42nd Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

The Division 3 and 4 boats will leave from Pt. Fermin on the Palos Verdes Peninsula at 1 p.m. The Aloha Class, Cal 40 class and Division 5 boats left Tuesday. The faster, larger boats will leave Sunday.

As of Thursday morning, Lady Bleu II of the Aloha class was farthest along, three miles ahead of Beautiful Day, 1,899 miles from Honolulu. B’Quest, with a crew of disabled sailors, was in third place out of four boats in Division 5, 1,939 miles from Honolulu.

Position reports and summaries are available at www.transpacificyc.org.

Winding Up

Those sharks captured on film as they swam lazily beyond the Santa Monica shoreline were not leopard sharks after all.

Anyone who knew anything about sharks knew that as soon as the footage first aired this week. They were too big, too plump and lacked the leopard pattern.

“I even heard someone say they were tiger sharks,” Dave Parker, a DFG shark expert, said of one of several misidentifications relayed by news anchors.

They were, most likely, white sharks, better known as great whites. But they probably were very young sharks who feed on small fish and pose no serious threat to swimmers. Southern California coastal waters are a nursery area for young white sharks.

“Although you can never be 100% certain without a close-up look, based on the footage I saw and the characteristics visible, these sharks are most probably white sharks,” Parker said. “This would also be consistent with the documented occurrence over the years of young white sharks along the Southern California coast during this time of year.”

It was very “Jaws”-like of them to pick this particular weekend to suddenly ham it up before the cameras.