Northwest Wild Country Radio Station

I have a running joke with Steve Bowman, managing editor of ESPN Outdoors’ website. Every now and then, I’ll cruise through the standings of the latest BASS Elite Series tournament, take note of a handful of names on the leader board, and give Big Steve a call back in Arkansas.

Shangle (no drawl): “Steve, Shangle here. You notice the Elite standings?”

Bowman: “Yessir, I did …” (Steve’s Southern politeness forces him to say “Yessir” instead of “Yeah, dumbass, I’m the guy who POSTED the standings. It's what I do for a living, remember?”)

Bowman: “Shangle, don’t start this crap again …” (Steve loves when I call!)

Shangle: “Five West Coast guys in the top 10! I see Van Dam’s in there. So’s Iaconelli … wait … where are the guys from the South?

Bowman (deep sigh): “I’m real busy, Shangle. You got anything important for me?”

Shangle: “Just checking. Because, you know, that’s five West Coast guys in the top 10. I just wanted to make sure the Southern guys weren’t competing in their own tournament on some other lake. Because, you know, I don't see any of those guys in the top 15 ...”

Bowman: “Do I need to remind you that the great state of Arkansas has six Classic wins? How many have your West Coast guys won?” (This is Steve’s attempt to scuttle the conversation with statistics)

Shangle: “Ancient history, Bow! Ghengis Khan was pretty badass at one time, too. But I don’t see anybody wearing fur helmets around these days.”

n California young gun Michael Bennett walked away with the FLW Championship this fall

n The top 15 in the 2007 BASS Angler of the Year race included six California natives (Reese, Aaron Martens, Jared Lintner, Fred Roumbanis, Gary Klein and Ish Monroe)

n West Coast anglers picked up BOTH AOY awards for the two major tournament trails in 2007: Skeet Reese squeezed by Kevin Van Dam to win the BASS AOY award, and Oregon State grad Jay Yelas walked away with the FLW AOY trophy

n Two years ago, Spokane Valley’s own Luke Clausen dominated the field at the 2006 Bassmaster Classic

n Two years prior to that, Clausen cashed his first $500,000 check with a wire-to-wire victory at the 2004 FLW Championship

n That’s the big picture. I can turn the gain up on the bass-tourney Lowrance and focus on some tasty, tiny tidbits, too (I haven’t hit Big Bow with any of these nuggets yet, so, y’all, shhhhhh, don’t spoil the surprise):

n Clausen’s 2006 Classic victory on Florida’s Lake Toho was highlighted by the biggest one-day limit ever weighed in through the event’s 36-year history – 29 pounds, 6 ounces – and the biggest three-day weight in three dozen Classics (56 pounds, 2 ounces

n Californian Dean Rojas destroyed the single-day BASS 5-fish weight record in 2001 with 45 pounds, 2 ounces. His four-day total of 108-12 was a BASS record, too

n Las Vegas native Byron Velvick weighed in a then-BASS-record 83-5 pounds at a 2000 event at Clear Lake, Calif.

The roots of professional bass fishing run deep in the Deep South, and the vast majority of the anglers on the Elite Series and FLW Series tours hail from “Bass Belt” states like South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, Alabama and Kentucky. Bass fishing is part of the culture of the South, like NASCAR and professional rasslin’.

Consequently, the major tournaments trails weave their way almost exclusively through the south, southeast and Midwest, with sporadic loops through California. This year’s Elite series, for example, has whistle stops in Florida (twice), Texas (twice), South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Iowa before finally breaking out of the Southland for two events in New York.

The FLW Series visits Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Michigan and South Carolina. The sport’s biggest event – the Classic – has been west of the Rocky Mountains exactly one time: at its inauguration in 1971, when Ray Scott Jr. flew the competitors to Lake Mead to compete for a $10,000 cash prize.

If your name is Clausen, Reese, Lintner, Velvick, Martens, Rojas or Yelas, son, you can now recite the menus at Waffle House and Shoney’s, and have developed a taste for grits. You’ve earned your tournament money competing on fisheries that lie clear across the country from home, in the literal back yards of the Southern anglers who have competed in the region since they pitched their first jigs in their first local club tournaments.

“If you’re coming from the West, you have to beat the learning curve on these fisheries real fast, or you’re sunk,” Clausen once told me about regular stops on the BASS/FLW rotations like Lay Lake, Guntersville and Toho. “When you get out here and start competing, you have to figure out places that you’ve never even seen before, and you don’t have a lot of time to do it. You’re out here to compete, and if you’re not able to adapt to the fisheries and techniques, you’re not going to do very well.”

And here, finally, we come to the point of my joking run-and-gun with Big Steve: Clausen, Reese, Velvick and Yelas and the rest of the Western big guns are the most adaptable, technically diverse group of fishermen on tour today. Matter of fact, the only other guys in the same class are the Van Dams and Iaconellis of the world – anglers who DIDN’T grow up in the Bass Belt, below the Mason-Dixon line.

It’s all about diversity. Clausen grew up in Spokane, heisting his dad Cal’s G-Loomis rods to fish salmon and steelhead on the Columbia River, and competing in regional tournaments that took him from flipping jigs on beaver huts at Potholes Reservoir one week to drop-shotting at 45 feet in crystal-clear Lake Washington the next.

Reese hails from Auburn, Calif., and competed in an ABA circuit that went from the Delta’s brackish tides to Lake Shasta’s cold, clear 500-foot depths to Clear Lake’s shallow flats and points in a three-week span.

Clausen’s 2006 Classic win on the Kissimmee Chain was an excellent example of West Coast conditioning trumping Bass Belt conditions. Approaching that event, the bass world was abuzz with the potential of a sight-fishing, record-bursting, south Florida orgy on bedding largemouth. What they got instead was a fishery that was unceremoniously shaken and stirred by an approaching weather system, and 51 competitors left to scramble like hell to figure out new patterns after their sight-fishing options were blown out in the first few hours of Day 1.

None of it fazed Clausen, who bagged a record 29-6 the first day and calmly hovered on the same 200-yard stretch for the entire four-day event, using a Western technique (drop-shotting) to pluck largemouth off individual stands of hydrilla.

The conditions turned downright Western as the Classic progressed, with wind gusts up to 40 mph and rain through Days 1 and 2, and a precipitous temperature drop on the tournament’s final day. For Clausen, it was just another day on the lake.

The 26-year-old had spent the first 10 years of his competitive fishing life battling the howling winds of Banks Lake and the Columbia River, two eastern Washington fisheries that routinely see 4-foot wind waves and 25-degree temperature shifts.

After Clausen fished his ESPN cameraman out of the water to start Day 3 – the poor dude was pitched overboard by Toho’s 2-foot wind waves – he minimized the affects of the blistering winds by keeping his rod tip in the water while he reeled, and rode his trolling motor unmercifully to stay on the same short stretch of the lake’s northwest shoreline.

“I don’t mind the wind,” Clausen deadpanned after he’d been handed the Classic’s trophy.

Clausen’s ability to find and catch fish in Toho was also directly related to his experience fishing two lakes with similarly silty bottoms near his eastern Washington home: Newman Lake and Lake Couer d’Alene.

“The pads I was fishing went deeper, and gave those bigger fish a place to spawn,” Clausen said. “It was a lot like the south end of Couer d'Alene: really flat, very silted in, with a lot of rice and vegetation.”

It goes beyond just one three-day tournament, though, as Velvick pointed out during an interview on Northwest Wild Country: “Out here in the West, we have so many different conditions to deal with that a lot of the Southern guys don’t see much of. We have tides. We have deep, cold, rocky lakes, we have massive rivers, we have shallow, weedy lakes. We have everything.”

Glancing through the results of the Lone Star Shootout, which wrapped up this afternoon on Falcon Lake in Zapata, Tex., I see familiar names in the top 20. There’s Velvick in third place, Martens 2 pounds behind him in fourth place, with Klein, Rojas and Reese also in the top 20.

By my math, that’s 25 percent of the top 20 from one West Coast state.I can see tomorrow’s conversation already:

Joel Shangle: “Steve, Shangle. Hey, did you notice the standings of the Lone Star Shootout? Looks like the West Coast guys did pretty good.”

Bowman: “Shangle, don’t start this crap again … have I mentioned that I'm real busy?”
-J.S.