Bill Cochran

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It is a wonder that Fred Pugh wasn’t arrested. He wore a cap pulled down over his head, and beneath it a pair of goggles. From the top of his nose to well below his throat, he wrapped a scarf. There was no skin showing.

A bandit?

No, a cold-weather bass fisherman.

Fellow bass fishermen have a name for Pugh: “The Legend.”

Back in the 1960s and into the early '70s, you needed fewer than the fingers on two hands to name the fishermen from the Roanoke Valley who knew how to consistently catch big fish. They were Fred Pugh, Grant Davis, Fred Foley, George Goodwin, Ray Hunziker, Duke Mayberry and Curtis Weaver. Lord, forgive me for anyone I left out.

Pugh had a theory: The best way to fish is alone; the best time to fish is when other people are watching bowl or playoff football games; the best lure to use is one that goes deep and moves slowly, the best place to work a lure is around structure.

I met Pugh when I became the youthful outdoor writer for the Roanoke Times in the early '60s. One Saturday afternoon my phone rang and it was the policeman assigned to Carvins Cove, Roanoke’s 630-acre water supply.

“There is a guy out here who has a string of bass you’d best come take a picture of,” I was told.

“Tell him I’m on my way,” I said.

“He won’t stay. He doesn’t want any publicity.”

The policeman got me Pugh’s address off of his boat registration form, and I headed to his home in Vinton. He wasn’t exactly delighted to see me, but I got the picture and we became friends and fishing partners. I fished with him probably two decades or so, then lost contact. I hadn’t seen him for years, until just before Christmas I spotted an elderly man hunkering over a display of fishing lures in a Roanoke store. It was Fred Pugh. He told he had turned 83.

Pugh never fished for numbers of bass. Fact is, small ones just got in his way. “I was always after the old big ones,” he said.

One day on Kerr Reservoir he caught 50 pounds of fish without moving his boat. Another day he landed 13 bass that weighed 90 pounds.

“I guess that was about the biggest thrill I ever had,” he said. “I caught fish that day until my arm got tired.”

I remember fishing with Pugh on Leesville Lake on New Year’s Day of 1976. It was so cold he had built a fire in a bucket in his boat. To take the pain of the wind chill off our minds we sang like drunken sailors while going down the lake.

At times like these, Pugh would drop his guard a bit. That day, he told me the biggest bass he ever caught weighed 10 pounds, 8 ounces and was taken from Carvins Cove. He had caught five others above 9 pounds, three of them from Smith Mountain Lake, a body of water not known for giving up big bass. As for 8-pounders, a fish most anglers only see in their dreams, he said he had landed so many “I don’t keep up with it.”

His lure of choice always was a “Lunker Special,” a gaudy spinnerbait he made in his basement. In the wintertime, when bass are lethargic, Pugh would work the lure vertically, letting it drop along rock ledges, its blade flashing and vibrating just enough to entice a strike that often was so gentle it was hard to believe an 8-pound bass was behind it.

Pugh was an accomplished structure fisherman long before modern depth finders/fish locators gave anglers an electronic eye to the mystery of what is beneath the surface. He used a plum line and weight or deep-running lure to locate humps, riverbeds, roadbeds, stumps and other flooded objects that big bass called home. An underwater silo foundation at Carvins Cove was good for numerous bragging-size bass.

When BASS came along, Pugh bought one of the first memberships, but never embraced tournament fishing. Some say it was because he couldn’t stand the thought of losing, but Pugh’s story was: “I wanted to fish my way, no one else’s way.”

That proved to be the case when he met a fellow big-bass expert from Kentucky for a week of fishing at Kerr/Gaston lakes. Pugh was excited about the prospects, but after two days came home. It had been a miserable outing, because the two experts couldn’t agree on where and how to fish.