Meet the members of a semi-secret, totally unorganized underground of sport anglers who sneak onto golf courses. The lure? Big, dumb bass.
A guy in a camouflage jacket is pacing in the almost empty parking lot behind a municipal golf course east of Los Angeles. His eyes, still adjusting to the fading light, dart from a group of workers loitering outside their trucks to a chain-link fence bordering the course.
“Hold on,” he says, then whips out his cellphone and speed-dials.
“Hi, Mom.”
He asks her if he’s got the right location. Is this where she sees the gate as she walks her dogs?
She says that it is.
John tucks a plastic box under his arm and walks quickly up a one-lane dirt road toward the undulating fairways. He tries to keep his eyes down and his goateed chin pinned to his chest, but more than once he gives in to the urge to glance back at the men standing under the lights. John decides that they’re not watching him. “It doesn’t look like I’m doing anything wrong,” he says.
A few hundred yards down the road he finds the gate, just where Mom said it would be. It’s open. John slogs through the thick grass in the direction of the only light--an anemic fluorescent coil above the distant entrance to a concrete restroom. The sounds of ducks quacking and the buzzing of the nearby 10 Freeway ride on cool air with a distinctive odor: two parts freshly cut grass, one part pesticide.
John stops at the edge of an amoeba-shaped pond. He pulls a tiny flashlight from his breast pocket, pops it in his mouth and then plucks a mock Roboworm from the plastic box. Within seconds it’s skewered on a barbless hook that dangles from a fishing rod. John scans the course from right to left and back again--all’s clear--and with a snap of his wrist the rubber bait soars over the water. A tiny ripple appears in the glow of an almost full moon, confirming touchdown.
John, a 34-year-old with the thick physique of a rugby player, lives nearby and works odd jobs when he isn’t poaching. He belongs to a semi-secret, completely unorganized underground of sport fishermen who sneak onto golf courses across the country to make sport of unsuspecting bass, catfish and whatever else swims among the sunken golf balls. In Southern California, these guerrilla anglers, who divulge their misdemeanors on the condition of anonymity, can pick from hundreds of private and public courses with at least one body of water guarding a green or lining a fairway. Some of the most committed covertly plant desired species in the ponds, creating an urban version of the neighborhood fishing hole.
Bass fishermen are particularly attracted to these off-limits, or “low fishing pressure” in angler-speak, waters because they tend to obsess about the size of their catches. You’ve seen these guys on the Outdoor Life Network. They schlep boats equipped with electronic fish finders to huge lakes stocked with hatchery fish, including Castaic and Pyramid in Southern California, in hopes of hauling in something the weight of a chain saw. But the behemoths are few and far between. “If you find a pond with big bass in it, it’s usually one that has ‘No Trespassing’ signs around it and requires a nighttime mission,” says Chuck Bauer, a noted big-bass specialist and veteran golf course poacher from Dallas. “The more protected the pond is, the bigger the fish are.”
Bass, like deer, get wilier with age, Bauer says. “There are always a few of them big old bucks with huge horns. The same thing with bass. A 14-pound bass is going to be much smarter than a 10-pound bass. Three-pound bass? They’re dumb.”
If left unmolested, bass can grow a pound a year on a diet of ducklings and fish, including smaller bass. What makes golf-course bass so appealing to poachers is that they gain size without getting wise to the tactics that anglers use against their scaly counterparts in sanctioned waters. They bulk up and stay dumb.
Catfish are no smarter. Ask Rick, a color-correction technician in the film industry, who often fishes off the Santa Monica Pier during his lunch hour. He says he caught a five-pounder on a spinnerbait down in Sylmar, at a little executive course called El Cariso. “You wouldn’t think there would be any fish, but I caught a big catfish,” he says.
He snagged the lunker during the day by stashing a rod in a golf bag with his driver and irons. It’s tricky to combine fishing with a round of golf, Rick concedes, but the glacial pace of the sport presents time, usually while waiting for a chance to hit from the tee, to sneak off to the water’s edge. “I break out a little miniature steel pole, with two eyes on it and a casting reel,” Rick says.
The odds of being detected are low. Consider that an 18-hole golf course covers from 100 to 400 acres, with many holes roughly 375 yards long from tee to green. There are rarely more than three foursomes in sight of each other per hole. Changes in elevation, trees, mounds, bunkers, even high grass can obscure poachers. Marshals patrol the courses, but their job is to prod slowpokes. There was a time, Rick says, he was asked by one course never to return.
John also is an avid golfer. Though he prefers poaching at night, when it’s easier to conceal a rod, he understands why Rick casts in daylight. “You’ve got some time, you’re waiting on another foursome and you see a fish. You might want to make a couple of casts,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s something the golf course will approve of.”
The Roboworm plops into the water again, and again. The largemouths that John hopes to hook on this cold night just aren’t biting. In an attempt to get his fishing head on, John clams up. Yet another cast--kerplunk!--and he’s all business now.
It’s around dusk, and before leaving his apartment for the night mission, John sifts through a small tackle box of homemade bait, looking for the ideal worm with which to lure a bass. “I do a lot of my own hand pouring,” he says. “Me and a good buddy of mine have made replicas of popular worms. We buy the plastic, scents and colors and mold them ourselves. You can save quite a bit of money.”
John, it turns out, is a former warden for the California Department of Fish and Game, and he’s seriously into fish. They’re everywhere in the living room of his apartment, mounted on the walls, swimming in a gurgling aquarium and pictured in weathered piscatorial manuals and old scrapbooks lining the bookshelves.
Tonight, because of the cool temperature and low light, he selects one of his six-inch cinnamon Roboworm knockoffs, which he’ll Texas rig--a method of securing a hook to bait so it’ll slip through weeds--on a four-pound test line. He chooses this “presentation” also because of the sound it will produce: a clicking, not unlike like that of a crayfish bumping against rocks. Furthermore, its unexposed hook will enable the worm to slide easily through rocks, trees and crevices and into the places where the bass will be hanging out.
Presentation is everything to a bass master. Water and weather conditions dictate lure selection, and a poorly chosen bait (the wrong type, color, size or movement) or incorrect setup almost guarantees an angler will walk away empty-handed. In fact, the weather dictates if it’s worth fishing at all. Low barometric pressure, according to Chuck Bauer, puts bass in a sort of stasis. Cold weather does the same. “It takes a lot of education and knowledge to become proficient, to know that every day you’re going to catch a fish.” Fishing for less savvy and passive types of fish isn’t nearly as challenging, or fun, Bauer says.
Catfish are a lazy man’s fish and, bass masters say, trout aren’t much better. Just like golf, bass fishing is jampacked with tips, techniques and “top secret” information guaranteed to help anglers hook the predatory fish again and again. When even the color of one’s clothing can affect bass behavior (a bright white shirt on a sunny day alerts older, wiser and, hence, bigger bass to the presence of an angler), you know there’s a lot to learn.
But shirt color doesn’t mean a thing when you sneak onto a golf course to fish at night. The “youthful fun,” as Bauer puts it, of fishing on a golf course is just one reason anglers risk a trespassing or poaching citation. The maximum fine for poaching at a public course, says the Department of Fish and Game, is $1,000 and/or one year in county jail--a misdemeanor. However, the punishment doled out is usually a slap on the wrist, which is what John once received when he got busted fishing a nearby golf course lake after dark.
They may break the law, but most poachers scrupulously follow catch-and-release etiquette. Perhaps it’s because they’re sensitive. Or they like the idea of hooking the same fish another day. Or maybe the thought of eating a bass that lives in reclaimed water grosses them out. “If I’m that hungry I can go to McDonald’s and order a Filet-o-Fish sandwich,” John says.
Here’s another theory: The poachers don’t deplete the supply because they planted the fish there in the first place. Though he won’t admit to stocking bass, John refers to the fish he’s trying to catch as “pets,” and says he’s eager to see how they’re doing. With his tackle box and fishing rod in hand, John kicks his screen door closed and heads toward the car that will take him to the golf course. The puny trunk of the Japanese two-door can’t accommodate John’s one-piece rod, so he sticks it out the window, where it will stay for the mile-long trip.
John’s frustrated. Cold air means slow bass and slow bass mean slow fishing, and John’s just reeling way too fast. He’s been casting for nearly an hour and the only thing he has to show for it are some weeds dangling off the Roboworm. The green slime is annoying him almost as much as the turtles wreaking havoc on the bass nests. “I despise them,” he grumbles.
In an attempt to draw out some bass and elude the weeds, John’s relocated twice around the perimeter of the lake. But even with the weeds in the distance, and the moon directly in his face assisting his sight, he’s got nothing to show for his efforts. Worse, his line is now in a snarl, what he refers to as a “bird’s nest.” The temperature has dropped into the upper 40’s, but John refuses to quit. “When I come here I want to at least get one. Just to prove to myself that I can get ‘em,” he says as he starts to untangle the line.
The rod jolts. John jerks it to set the hook. “What are the odds of that?” he says, chuckling. As soon as he stops paying attention, he lands one. Since the bird’s nest has completely jammed his reel, John has to pull the fish toward shore, and for the first time tonight he seems confident in what he’s doing. He flicks on the flashlight while pulling pliers out of his pocket, all the while tending to the aggravated bass.
Suddenly the fish jumps into the faint moonlight.
John sticks the light in his mouth and shines it in the direction of the spastic fish, calmly pulling it closer and closer. The fish tires and surrenders. John grabs the line and hoists the bass out of the water.
“Florida-strain largemouth, 16 inches, small, couple of pounds,” he says clinically, sticking his thumb into its mouth and clamping down on its lower lip to paralyze it. He shines the light up and down its body, revealing surprisingly subtle, beautiful fins and a fist-sized mouth with tiny recessed teeth, before using the pliers to take out the hook.
The largemouth is now hanging vertically, mouth up, frozen in midair. John knows every inch of it, but he can’t say for sure if he’s caught this one before. There are no easily identifiable characteristics such as a lost eye or a broken hook stuck in its mouth.
After a few minutes of airtime, John cradles the head in his left hand and underbelly in his right. He lowers the fish into the water, swishing it back and forth a couple of times. While the flashlight casts a dim light onto the murky water, the shocked fish pauses for a second to gather itself. Then, with a sudden kick of its tail fin, it darts away.
A tiny smile creeps across John’s face as he heads to the parking lot. Back in the apartment, John’s roommate has left the TV on, a rerun of “That ‘70s Show.” John dumps his rod and tackle box into the hall closet next to a vinyl golf bag. From his cage in the kitchen, a sun conure named Herman is chirping away to the sitcom’s amplified laugh track.
John’s beat. As he kicks back to soak up some four-camera comedy, his arm rests on a skinned bobcat draped over the couch. John takes off the fishing license that’s been hanging around his neck and tosses it on the coffee table. “I wear it whenever I’m fishing,” he had said when he put it on. “I don’t care whether I need it or not.”