Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 4, 1992 TAG: 9202040036
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Cochran
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BASS CHASING GETS SERIOUS IN CLASSROOM
The past weekend wasn't an ideal time to catch bass, with its bright sun, mile-high sky and biting wind, but weather wasn't the reason you may have seen fewer fishermen on the lakes.More than 300 anglers were gathered at the Tanglewood Holiday Inn for the Bass Fishing Techniques Institute, which offers what might be akin to an advanced degree in catching black bass.
If you still need convincing that bass fishing no longer is a genteel pastime but a fierce avocation - even a vocation - you had only to poke your head into one of the meeting rooms. There you would have seen fishermen who had plunked down $69 and agreed not just to spend the weekend indoors, but in classrooms with textbooks, note pads and instructors. They had come from as far away as South Carolina and Delaware.
The professors were pros, like Larry Nixon, Woo Daves and Zell Rowland, and the language was peppered with technical terms, like Doodle Worm, Sluggo, Do Nothin, Carolina Rig, Gitiz and Flippin.
The fact that a fish that once was culturally deprived now is the subject of post-graduate work isn't the only change in bass angling.
Gone are the days when bass fishermen carried tackle in a shoe box tucked under an arm. They now tote tackle systems, with fighter-plane names, like the 797 Phantom. Rods are not just made of graphite, but Advance IM-6 graphite, and monogrammed with names like Bionic Blade. Reels are shaped like miniature sports cars. Lures don't just come in reds, greens and blues. They are bubble gum, power blue and Merthiolate.
Why the fuss?
"I have done all kinds of fishing, and the bass is the most wily one out there," Daves said with hushed reverence. "You can go out there today with a perfect Bagley lure and catch 50 pounds of bass. You go back tomorrow to the same spot with the same lure and can't buy a strike."
The fact that the zero days are considerably more common than the 50-pound days tends to fill seminar rooms and jingle tackle shop cash registers even during a recession.
"There are so many things out there now that when you go into a store you can get confused over what to buy," said Nixon. "I think we help sort out items that a fisherman really needs."
Nixon is a competitive fisherman who is about two cranks of a reel handle away from earning a total of $1 million in BASS tournaments.
Nixon and Daves agree that the big tackle item this season is the Sluggo-type lure.
"It still is amazing how many people haven't caught onto this type of fishing," said Nixon. "I look for it to be the hottest item in sales this year."
In time, though, it will become just another lure, predicted Daves.
"How many lures do you have in your tackle box that you probably haven't tied on for two or three years?" he asked. "You lose interest in them when something else gets hot."
But it appears that the bass itself never will lose its steam. The trout is more mythical, the muskie more mysterious, the striper much bigger, but only the working class of American game fish, the black bass, can fill seminars.