Bill Cochran

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One thing you can say about John Powell, he didn’t spend much money on boat gas when he went bass fishing.

I recall the first time I fished with him many years ago on Smith Mountain Lake. He was from Alabama and I was the local host, so when we launched his boat I told him, with considerable authority in my voice, that we needed to make a lengthy run to reach one of my bass hot spots.

“What’s the matter with right here?” Powell asked. Before I could tell him, he’d flipped his electric bow motor into action and was slowly moving along the shoreline casting a plastic worm to every hump, bump, log, stump, rock, fallen tree and grass patch that he could see. He didn’t even fire up the outboard engine. No need to. He was getting a hit on about every other cast within site of the ramp. He had the reputation of being able to catch bass out of flooded cow tracks.

Powell was the champion of shallow-water, plastic-worm fishing. He introduced many people, including me, to the new technique. I can’t recall how many times I fished with him in the 1970s, but it wasn’t enough. He died recently at age 78, and he will be remembered as one of the great anglers of all time.

Modern bass fishing was beginning to take root in the '60s when Powell retired from the Air Force with 22 years of service. He jumped into the new angling trend that was changing everything about bass fishing.

At the time, Ray Scott was launching the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society and Powell became an early star on the tournament circuit, winning the first ever BASS event at Lake Eufaula (Alabama) in 1968. He weighed in an amazing 132-pound catch that shocked the angling world. Powell also won back-to-back at Sam Rayburn (Texas) and Table Rock (Missouri) in 1971. He qualified for six Bassmaster Classics, but seldom broke the top 10.

Scott loaded Powell and fellow star Roland Martin onto a Bluebird bus and began holding seminars across the country in the early '70s. A stop in Roanoke brought a decent crowd to a local theater where Powell and Martin taught the locals the fine points of modern bass fishing. Scott preached anti-pollution and signed up new BASS members.

Although Powell worked with Scott, fished his tournaments, participated in his seminars, joked with him and certainly benefited from him, he also was the first pro fisherman I am aware of to be a critic. Powell though Scott was garnishing too much fame and fortune on the backs of anglers like himself, whose tournament earnings were modest. But BASS was the only game in town. You did it Scott’s way and had a chance to become a legend or you were on your own.

Powell did both, yielding to the bidding of Scott and spending a good bit of time on his own, crossing the country conducting seminars for a worm manufacture, often in the back of mom and pop tackle shops.

His technique was to go to a local lake, catch an eye-popping string of bass and leave it off at a local tackle shop with a note that he would be back the next day to conduct a seminar on how he caught the fish. People came because they couldn’t believe anyone could catch bass like that from their local lake. This was before the days of catch-and-release.

A good case could be built that Powell was the father of modern fishing seminars. He taught thousands of people the joys of bass fishing, and it didn’t matter to him whether the student was a kid or millionaire. Just as he didn’t bow to Scott, he also didn’t look down on anyone. Everyone was an equal.

On one trip to Kerr Lake, an impoundment he loved, he was catching bass after bass from the bow seat and I was doing very little from the stern. I told him I was casting for the leftovers and if I were in the front seat I could catch as many bass as he did.

He immediately switched seats with me and began catching bass out of the stern while I continued my poor success. Casting accuracy and feel made the difference for Powell. He was big on instructing anglers to watch their line and to strike as soon as it twitched rather than waiting to feel a bass.

“If you feel a tap, tap, tap, the first tap is the bass taking your worm, the second tap is the bass spitting it out and the third tap is me tapping you on the shoulder and telling you that you done missed the bass,” he told me.

If the first couple of feet of retrieve didn’t bring a strike, he would rapidly reel in and cast again. Toward the end of the day his arm would swell and become painful, something he called “caster’s elbow.”

“Keep your worm wet,” he would say. “You ain’t going to catch nothing with it out of the water.”