Friday, May 02, 2008
Fish stories
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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A big, pot-bellied bass.
That's what Dick Saacke sought as he eased his little boat along Smith Mountain Lake's brushy shoreline on that pretty Saturday in early May back in 1970.
He was among the more than 1,000 contestants entered in the Optimist Club of Cave Spring's Fishing Tournament, an event then in its second year.
The winning bass was worth a 14-foot Arrowglass Tarpon boat with a 33-horsepower Evinrude motor, a might bit beefier craft than Saacke's simple, 12-foot long Starcraft.
Saacke looked at his reel and with dismay saw a couple of loose loops of line, the kind that would keep him from making the accurate casts he needed to put his white Heddon Hellbender in the pockets where lunker largemouths lurked.
"I just cast over my shoulder into the middle of the lake to get the loops out," recalled a sheepish Saacke, a retired Virginia Tech professor who lives in Blacksburg. "I started reeling in and that's when it hit.
"I thought, 'Man, this is a huge bass.' "
And so it has been for nearly three decades in this tournament, a humble, wide-open free-for-all where anglers of all shapes, sizes and abilities try to out-fish each other over three days in early May.
It's a tournament that has, in many ways, traced the evolution of the fishery at Smith Mountain Lake.
And it's a contest where the winners are just as likely to have been lucky than good.
Humble beginnings
Smith Mountain Lake was just a few years old when the Cave Spring Optimist Club held the first tournament in early May 1969.
The club hoped it could help raise money for their community service projects, which benefit kids.
An estimated 800 fishermen bought entry tickets, which were $3.50 in advance and $5 the last couple of weeks before the tournament.
While ticket prices have changed plenty since then -- they went up to $40 this year -- the distribution method is relatively unchanged.
Contestants still must buy their entry tickets either in person at stores, or they can order them by mail.
From the beginning the tournament has always drawn many anglers from outside the Roanoke area.
One of the visitors at that first tournament was a fisherman from Ohio who was passing through on his way home from Florida.
When that man -- a stocky policeman appropriately named John Wayne -- turned in the contest's winning largemouth, so started another tournament tradition: accusations of malfeasance.
"Plenty of people thought he brought the fish up from Florida," said retired Roanoke Times outdoor writer Bill Cochran, who has covered all 39 tournaments. "But I couldn't really write about that.
"I didn't want to get sued."
In the early days, before catch and release, biologists would cut open winning fish in an effort to prove they had come from the lake. While rumors and accusations may have flown, little ever came of them.
Skeptics remain, even though organizers have long employed someone to administer polygraph tests to winners, or any other top placer whose catch is challenged.
The tactic appears to have been a good deterrent as legitimate problems have been rare. But not unheard of.
"One year a guy won three categories," said the club's Ike Harris, who has helped run all 40 tournaments. "Then he failed the lie detector test."
The angler threatened to sue as he stormed from the weigh-in site. But club organizers never again heard from him.
Eyes on the prize
Critics of fishing tournaments sometimes say that any time money or prizes are on the line, some one will try to skirt the rules.
This tournament's prizes have always been impressive, particularly in the eyes of weekend anglers.
These days, outside the kids' contest -- whose winners get tackle and savings bonds -- this is a cash affair. The winner of each category get's $1,000, with payouts through fourth place. A tournament record nets a $500 bonus.
But in early tournaments, the prizes came in the form of merchandise.
In 1970, they included a couple of boat and motor packages, lots of fishing tackle, a set of Firestone tires and a "$1,000 lot located in the lake area."
The lot was for the winning muskellunge.
"As I headed out the door, my wife said, 'Win the lot,' " Saacke recalled.
The request was on his mind when he pulled what he assumed was a trophy bass close to the boat and saw that it was actually a muskie.
Saacke didn't have a landing net on the boat but managed to get to shore where he was able to beach the fish, which was later weighed at 13 pounds, 4.5 ounces.
"It wasn't that big for a muskie," he said.
But it was big enough to win the lot, which was about a block off the lake in Bedford County.
"When we went to get the deed, they said if he paid another $500 we could get a waterfront lot," Saacke said. "But when you have five kids, and I was just getting started at Tech, we were just scraping by."
That lot is now assessed at $10,000 according to Bedford County real estate records.
"It's still there," Saacke said, chuckling. "We haven't done anything with it."
He still has the boat and the Hellbender plug, too.
Tournament trends
The tournament boomed through the 1970s, at times drawing nearly 2,000 entries, nearly four times the number it draws these days.
It didn't hurt that organizers would invite outdoor writers from outside the area for a pre-tournament cocktail party in hopes that those writers would give the event some publicity.
It also didn't hurt that the tourney was producing some lunkers, including a few largemouth bass topping 9 pounds, plenty of 5-pound smallmouths and good numbers of hefty stripers and crappies.
And then there were the trout.
Stocked in Smith Mountain Lake in its early years, the coldwater fish were among the species included in early tournaments. The 1970 tournament even produced a 7.55-pound whopper.
Things weren't so impressive another year, when the winning trout weighed a meager 6.4 ounces.
Trout eventually were dropped from the list when they were no longer stocked in the lake. Other species have come and gone and, in one case, come again.
In the 1980s, tournament officials dropped striped bass because of complaints from anglers who felt the tournament was putting too much strain on the lake's striper population.
But after the state stopped stocking walleyes in the lake, the club needed a replacement and brought back stripers last year. A new slot limit in place during tournament time ensures that at most a few fish will meet the tournament minimum.
Last year just two anglers submitted stripers.
Tournament officials have wondered if they need to drop muskies from the event because no one has entered one since 1988. But muskies are still stocked in the lake and fishermen do occasionally catch one, so they remain on the list.
Other than walleyes over the past few years, the other categories always seem to produce qualifying entries. The one surprising exception came in 1985, when not a single largemouth bass was entered.
A look at winning weights shows how fishing at the lake has changed.
The winning largemouth bass hasn't topped 9 pounds since 1973. The last smallmouth over 6 pounds came two years before that.
On the other side of things, catfish keep getting bigger. The winning fish didn't top 20 pounds until 1993. Since 1996 the winning cat has weighed at least 21 pounds, with several winners topping 30 pounds.
Weighed fish go into huge tanks at tournament headquarters. The tanks themselves have become quite an attraction, drawing gawkers throughout the weekend.
The fish are tagged so anglers can claim them after the award ceremony.
Many go unclaimed and go right into the lake. About half are spoken for, but most of those are also released after a few pictures.
Many anglers who don't win prizes stay to watch the releases. They "ooh" and "ahh" as the trophy fish are netted and pulled from the tanks.
And they hope next year is their year to win.
