The Good Old Days
By Terry Battisti
Northwestern Staff Writer
Feb. 1, 2008
Without a doubt, bass fishing’s complexion has changed over the last 30-plus years. Changes in tackle and techniques have made us all better fishermen and the internet has increased our learning capabilities and speed by magnitudes of order. Gone are the days of having to wait months before knowing who won “The Classic” or waiting to learn about some new technique that’s being used or developed on the West coast, East coast or in Japan. Knowledge transfer is nearly real-time and the only thing holding up this transfer are electrons – or a heavily used internet server.
I recently completed an article for another rag that took me back to the early 70s – when I first started bass fishing. I wrote about the late split-shotting and dart-head legend Dick Trask and how his contributions affected the sport. Part of this project required me to call and talk to a number of old friends about Dick and how he essentially changed the face of bass fishing. Many of the people I called are still involved with the southern California tournament scene. As I conducted my interviews, topics would shift and invariably, my interviewees and I would talk about “The Good Old Days” and how times have changed.
Back then anglers weren’t faced with as many options as today’s anglers. In the 70s, there were only two serious options for levelwind reels: the ABU Garcia 5000 series reels and the Lew’s Speed Spool. Diawa, Shakespeare and Pflueger were considered poor quality and Shimano was OEM-ing the Speed Spool for Lew Childre. A good quality reel cost around $60 unless you found them on sale in the Bass Pro Shops Close-Out sale paper. Sometimes you could get a brand new ABU 5000C for $29.95
The same can be said about graphite rods (Fenwick and Lew’s Speed Sticks), electronics (who remembers the Lowrance Green Box?), and plastic worms. Back then if you weren’t throwing a Mann’s Jelly Worm, FlipTail, or Mister Twister Phenom you more than likely weren’t fishing a plastic worm.
Another major change from the past to the present is in the boat designs. The standard full-blown rig consisted of a 15- to 16-foot boat fitted with a couple of pedestal seats, a Green Box, an anchor and davit system fore and aft and a 40-hp Mercury or Johnson outboard connected to a steering wheel via a system of cables and pulleys. Only the professionals had what few 17-foot boats were available complete with 150-hp Black Max motors.
Tournaments were competitive but entry fees and payouts were low and there was serious comradery amongst everyone participating. If an angler saw someone on a spot or in an area, they were left alone; if they were your friend, you might come in close and ask how they were doing.
Back then a bass boat cost around $5,000.00 for a fully outfitted rig and you were hard pressed to spend more than $10,000.00 on the biggest, baddest boat on the market. Gas cost less than a buck a gallon, lake fees were cheap if they existed at all and the state-of-the-art crankbait, the Bagley’s DB2, cost a whopping $3.95.
Talking with my friends during the interviews for the article about Trask, we reveled on how simple Dick fished. For most of his fishing life he fished out of a late 70s 15-foot “bathtub-style” MonArk stick-steer bass boat with a 40-horsepower Mercury outboard. This was even into the late 90s when bass boat technology had really taken stride. His tackle was simple too, yet he managed to take (I mean win) more money from anglers in California than most other anglers combined – slowest boat and all.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my 2006 BassCat complete with its 250-horse Merc and all the other accoutrements it has to offer. I love my 11-bearing casting reels that cost more than the GNP of some countries and I also love my high-dollar, high-tech computer designed crankbaits and jerkbaits. But, at the same time I sit and reflect on the good old days of the past and I have to smile.
Dick kicked our proverbial fannies all over California for years fishing out of what he could afford and with what he felt comfortable using. It doesn’t take a $60,000 rig, a $40,000 tow vehicle or $400 rods and reels to catch fish. It just takes the desire to learn and learning can be done just as easily in an old rundown school house as it can be done at Harvard.