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November/December 2005

"Going into the day I had prepared myself - I had heard that Clunn talks very little in the boat. He actually spoke more than I expected, and on the way to and from the ramp he was quite talkative, and always spoke with great candor."

The night before I was to ride with Rick Clunn on Day Two of the recent Bassmaster Classic, I pondered what sort of stories the day would produce. I tried to envision Clunn on the water, but I kept drawing a blank in my mind's eye. I had fished around him, and seen hours of TV footage of his angling achievements, but still I couldn't conjure up a single image of him with a rod in his hand.

I had no such trouble when I attempted to visualize other "living legends" in the act of fishing: I can clearly see Denny Brauer pitching a jig into the far recesses of a boathouse, or Shaw Grigsby flinging a tube jig toward a skittish bedding bass, or even David Fritts sitting in a chair with his rod across his thigh, working a deep-diving crankbait at a precise angle to hit a miniscule piece of underwater cover. But when it came to Clunn, I had no such mental images.

I was, however, able to remember notable Clunn quotations, and could even hear his soft-spoken, professorial voice in my head. That's when it hit me; it dawned on me that while Clunn is clearly a tremendous angler - after all, that was the day after he had been named victorious in ESPN's "Greatest Angler Debate" - his primary legacy to the sport may be as a thinker, strategist, and fishing philosopher.

His bona fides as an angler cannot be questioned - among other achievements with his nearly two million dollars in BASS earnings, an Angler of the Year title and four Classic victories under his belt, he has remained at the top of the professional tournament scene for over 30 years. Accordingly, I was interested in watching him fish and adjust after Day One, a tough day which produced an uncharacteristic empty livewell. At the same time, though, I wanted to hear what he had to say about a wide variety of topics. He did not disappoint me on either count.

Going into the day I had prepared myself - I had heard that Clunn talks very little in the boat. He actually spoke more than I expected, and on the way to and from the ramp he was quite talkative, and always spoke with great candor.

While Clunn struggled in Pittsburgh, he has nothing to lose. His unimpeachable credentials give him the leeway to swing for the fences until he's blue in the face, secure in his own legacy and his continuing quest for angling perfection. His position at the forefront of the sport also gives him the security to opine on a wide variety of topics. The following are his unedited thoughts expressed during the tournament.

I've never been a morning person. That's one of the great ironies of my career. That's why I like the E50's so much. I've always caught more fish in the middle of the day than first thing in the morning. I guided for 14 years and I've been doing this for 33, and I still haven't gotten used to it.

I fished for everything growing up, trotlines, perch, freshwater, and saltwater. But a bass was the first thing that I got to hit a fake lure, and that intrigued me to no end.

The question makes you redefine intelligence. I'm often asked, "Is a bass smart?" We're often guilty of attributing human characteristics to animals. If smart is the ability to utilize all of its sense to full capabilities, then they're smarter than we are - if it's memory, thoughts, and intellect, then the answer is no. We survive because we live in an encapsulated environment. We don't use our sense of smell or our sense of touch. We only hear the things we want to hear.

I've never bought into the idea that fishing is contemplative. I agree with that, but not for bass fishing. It's pure competition. I don't care whether it's you and the fish, you and your friend, or you and your dad."

The belief that a tournament like this makes me realize that how good we are is pretty relative. The best fishermen are usually only a five or six on a scale of one-to-ten, and this Classic illustrates it. The fish are here, but if we're as good as we think we are, there would've been 20 limits yesterday. There are days I've been an eight or a nine, but they are exceptionally rare.

It's not like school, where you can just fish harder. Instinct, intuition, being in tune with natural rhythms, they are all a function of awareness. As humans, with respect to awareness, we are disabled. We can screw up these days and a saber tooth tiger's not going to eat us. Metaphorically speaking, to make a quantum leap we have to return to being a caveman - to feel life in terms of the rhythm of the water, sense the major and minor feeding periods. We are attuned to artificial things, like turning on dams and opening locks, but we need to teach ourselves to see the natural world, notice the minnow flipping 100 yards away.

We all have what I call "blind spots." You've read where the fish are supposed to be and as you run down the lake, you look at places and say, "Good spot, bad spot, good spot, bad spot, good spot, bad spot." We intellectually discriminate. But you can practice awareness. In my school, we practice awareness even more than fishing. We work on switching back and forth from a wide angle to a narrow focus.

The end will take care of itself if you do the other things. I've been studying Apache techniques. An old Apache man who didn't really know anything about fishing made the statement to me one time that we do most everything completely backwards. He said, "If I want to study the owl, I don't study the owl, I study the mouse." Yet we as fishermen know very little about the bluegill or shad, and they're the mouse in the bass's world.

This is a psychological game, it always is. One bad day is not going to take you out of it. All of these fishermen wouldn't be here if they were not good at coming back. An open mind is the best way to fish. That's the type of tournament this is. Nobody has moved away from the pack, it'll only take three or four pounds to make the cut.

It's still in our genetics; we're only 200 years removed from explorers and frontiersmen. There's value in trying to bring it back to a conscious level. You can't go into a game and preplan the moves you're going to make. You can preplan, but when they hand you that ball and the hole isn't there in the line, you have to react. Meanwhile, the brain is telling you something different. What makes athletes great is the spontaneous ability to improvise. What's the most important thing in basketball? It's court awareness. It's the same thing here with fishing, except our court is a little bigger.

Yesterday, I was executing at a level of five on a scale of ten, but I expect to see a flip-flop today. Guys who had six pounds yesterday could have nothing today, or could catch another five or six pounds (Ed. Note: First day leader Jimmy Mize blanked on Day Two). I fished up the Mon yesterday, but I'll fish down here (in the Ohio) today. In practice here I had 21 bites and another 21 or so followed it to the boat, but maybe only one was a keeper. But I'm starting fresh today because it's sometimes better to fish water as if it's the first day you've ever fished it.

"This place has a lot of fish. Each day I've seen at least 40 bass swirling or following the bait, and there are swarms of three to four-inch fingerlings. When you look at the amount of life in this system, I'm slowly getting a sense of the potential of the fishery. I'm not a biologist, but if a body of water is in trouble those other signs of life are usually the first to go. Big fish, when the water gets hot, they are predictably nocturnal. The mystery is why we're not catching more in the one to two-pound range.

The cut system is good. The final day weigh-in needs to be shorter. It has needed to be that way for a long time.

For purely selfish reasons, I'd like to return to that. If we'd have kept the mystery lake concept going I'd have probably won twice as many Classics. Without any help I'm just better at finding fish than the rest of them.