Bass Fish

Captain Jim Smith embarks from Berkeley Marina well before dawn, the Bay Bridge a neon yellow against the dark sky, the San Francisco skyline a faint orange through the thin mist. The Happy Hooker glides past Alcatraz Island and beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, rounds Point Lobos and heads south toward Pacifica Beach, where Smith eventually settles directly atop a school of large fish.

Time is running out and Marc Mitrany knows it. The sun hovers over the western ridge; a long afternoon of fishing at Lake Casitas is winding to a close. The lead guide for Ojai Angler had, a week earlier, hooked a client up with a dream bass, a 16-pound female, which was weighed and released. Now there's a reporter on board and all the two have caught are a few 2- to 3-pounders -- certainly nothing to boast about.

Hajime SUZUKI is betting it all on the whim of a cold-blooded animal. His girlfriend, Yoshie Ishii, sits beside him aboard a yellow Ranger boat, hands clasped at the tip of her nose, praying he hooks a big one. The promise? If he gets a 10-pound fish, he'll propose marriage on the spot. The couple spent $2,500 to travel from Japan to Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet to catch the fish that could change their lives. "For me it is bass or die," says Suzuki. "I have bet my life for bass."

Frank Sabatino, one of the last commercial fishermen left in Brooklyn, is generally acknowledged to be a tough customer. He has survived two sinkings in chilly Atlantic waters, one of which put him in the hospital for three days, battling hypothermia. Two years ago, while he was out fishing alone about two hours from shore, he accidentally gouged one of his eyes with a fish pick, blinding himself. Instead of calling the Coast Guard, he sopped up the blood with a rag and steamed home.

More than 90 restaurants in Los Angeles and Orange counties are expected to pledge to yank Chilean sea bass from their menus in an effort to save the fish from overfishing and possible extinction. The move, to be announced Tuesday, joins similar pledges made by chefs in Northern California, Chicago and Houston. The "Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass" campaign is expected to spread to New York, Philadelphia and Washington in coming months.

The surfers who flocked to this city's beaches last Friday probably had no idea what the commotion at the lagoon across the highway was all about. The commuters riding the train through town could, at best, catch only a glimpse of what must have seemed nothing more than a big party. And few could have guessed that it was being held in honor of fish--white sea bass--and the people who for the last 13 years have been working to bring more of them into the world.

When bass fishing fanatics aren't on the water, thoughts turn to getting back on the water -- and new strategies to increase the odds of finding and landing the scrappy fish. This site can help anglers get a competitive edge. There's enough here to satisfy the most fervent bassaholic, including tips and articles for both beginner and seasoned anglers and lots of details on the latest gear. A convenient links section also provides a directory of other, similar sites.

Conservation efforts from Maine to Florida have brought the striped bass back from near extinction, a commission said. In declaring the fish recovered, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission cleared the way this week for relaxing catch restrictions that have protected the species since the early 1980s. Striped bass, also known as rockfish, spawn primarily in the rivers of the upper Chesapeake Bay, though some reproduce in the Hudson and Delaware rivers and in North Carolina.

On a rainy June morning in 1932, a poor farm boy named George Perry decided to forgo plowing for the day to fish with a friend in Montgomery Lake, a muddy oxbow off the Ocmulgee River in southern Georgia. After an hour of casting with a "wiggle-fish" lure from a handmade boat, the lanky 20-year-old farmer set his hook on fishing immortality. His lure snared something so heavy he assumed he had snagged an underwater root.

About every five months or so from now on, a pickup truck is scheduled to pull up to the dock in front of the Harbor Patrol station at Dana Point Harbor. Attendants will open a large tank of seawater on the truck's back end. Then, using a wide hose, they will siphon the water into three underwater pens separated by fishnet. Swooshing down the long hose will be thousands of tiny baby white sea bass.

On a rainy June morning in 1932, a poor farm boy named George Perry decided to forgo plowing for the day to fish with a friend in Montgomery Lake, a muddy oxbow off the Ocmulgee River in southern Georgia. After an hour of casting with a "wiggle-fish" lure from a handmade boat, the lanky 20-year-old farmer set his hook on fishing immortality. His lure snared something so heavy he assumed he had snagged an underwater root.

Ish Monroe arrived at the big fishing tournament feeling lucky. The Modesto angler flew to Alabama, hooked his $40,000 bass boat to his fancy truck, and negotiated the highways and back roads without a hitch. Flashing blue lights did not appear in his rearview mirror. There were no drug-sniffing dogs and no handcuffs -- not a single "DWB" episode.

Six a.m. on the Mokelumne River. The sun has yet to rise over the meandering waterways of Northern California's Delta country. Clyde Wands has driven 50-some miles south from Sacramento, winding across a maze of levees and sloughs with his 17-foot boat hitched to his Ford pickup. Backing down the marina ramp, he prepares to launch the Old Fisherman onto the river's south fork. It's cold, but Wands doesn't care.

A lifeguard at La Jolla Cove realized something was amiss when three neoprene-clad men with spear guns flopped from a boat into a marine ecological reserve. Soon after, he saw them wrestle something big and black into the boat, says California Department of Fish and Game warden Erik Fleet. When authorities intercepted the vessel, they discovered Blackie -- a 50-something-year-old giant black sea bass weighing 171 pounds -- skewered.

Mike LONG silently guides his bass boat along the shore toward a sunken, mossy boulder in San Vicente Lake in San Diego County. Peering through polarized sunglasses into murky green water, he spots a pair of largemouth bass spawning in the shallows and closes in on them. Long, 39, works as a construction manager in Poway, but on the water he's a bass-busting surgeon. He stops the boat, whips out a rod and tosses an orange plastic worm at the fish, but they ignore it.

When bass fishing fanatics aren't on the water, thoughts turn to getting back on the water -- and new strategies to increase the odds of finding and landing the scrappy fish. This site can help anglers get a competitive edge. There's enough here to satisfy the most fervent bassaholic, including tips and articles for both beginner and seasoned anglers and lots of details on the latest gear. A convenient links section also provides a directory of other, similar sites.

They will arrive any day now, all those good ol' bass fishermen from Fish Fry, Ala., and Crawdad, N.C. They have swallowed the fact that the biggest largemouth bass in the world lives not in the backwaters of a swamp down South, but in an outdoor bathtub 40 miles from Hollywood, near a freeway. The world record of 22 pounds 4 ounces has stood for nearly 61 years and outlived its owner, George Perry, who pulled it out of Montgomery Lake in Georgia on June 2, 1932.

The devastation of California's striped bass, hastened by nature's long-running drought and man's increased demands for water, has prompted the biggest and most expensive restocking of the fish ever attempted. In a race to prevent the striped bass's disappearance from Northern California rivers and bays, state officials have begun planting 1-year-old stripers in the environmentally stressed Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

Hajime SUZUKI is betting it all on the whim of a cold-blooded animal. His girlfriend, Yoshie Ishii, sits beside him aboard a yellow Ranger boat, hands clasped at the tip of her nose, praying he hooks a big one. The promise? If he gets a 10-pound fish, he'll propose marriage on the spot. The couple spent $2,500 to travel from Japan to Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet to catch the fish that could change their lives. "For me it is bass or die," says Suzuki. "I have bet my life for bass."

In shallow water along the west shore of Lake Casitas, beside branches covered with shaggy moss, lies a fish "nest," made not of twigs and feathers but scraped into a plate-size depression of gravel and clam shells. A male largemouth bass made it with his tail and nose and hopes to entice the big females lurking nearby to spawn. Bass do this every spring. Yet, intimacy leads to vulnerability, and it is this moment that anglers such as Eric Elshere wait for all year.