Bass fishing sea change could benefit NNY

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WADDINGTON — One Friday morning in August, even before the sun had risen over the St. Lawrence River, the docks in Waddington were aglow. Some of the artificial light came from a flotilla of sleek boats that drifted around the marina, kitted out with luminous fish-finder devices. The rest emanated from smartphones and video cameras, as dozens of professional anglers recorded social-media clips ahead of the last competition of the regular season.

The Bass Anglers Sportsman Society — or BASS — turned 50 this year, and the professional tournament circuit it runs, the Bassmaster Elite Series, has long been considered the most prestigious in the world. In Waddington, 107 men were competing for a top payout of $100,000. Whoever won would amass points good for the Angler of the Year prize, worth another $100,000, as well as entry in the Bassmaster Classic tournament, aka “the Super Bowl of fishing,” where the victor takes home $300,000.

With a few minutes to go before the start of competition, Kevin VanDam sat in the driver’s seat of his Nitro Z21. As a cameraman crouched before him, he began a Facebook Live feed for his nearly 250,000 followers. An avuncular 51-year-old from Kalamazoo, Mich., he is considered the best bass fisherman in history — and certainly the best compensated, with more than $6.4 million in BASS winnings. His sponsors — Toyota, GoPro, Oakley and Yeti coolers, to name a few — likely push his annual earnings into the seven figures.

No one — not the fans, not even VanDam — realized on that sleepy morning that the world of professional bass fishing was on the cusp of a radical transformation. A month later, VanDam would soberly announce on Facebook that after 29 years, he was bolting from BASS to an upstart rival. Major League Fishing, founded in 2011 in partnership with the Outdoor Channel, had announced a professional competition circuit of its own for 2019, called the Bass Pro Tour, and the news had slapped the industry.

At last count, VanDam and nearly 70 other BASS anglers have been lured away by the promise of more control over league decisions, a more TV-friendly competition format and bigger money. The Bass Pro Tour will have a total payout approaching $10 million.

BASS has responded by lowering its entry fees and upping the prize money at a number of events. The one-upmanship means that right now is possibly the most lucrative moment in history to be a professional catcher of bass.

Impact on north country

Waddington Village Mayor Janet Otto-Cassada has been involved in helping attract professional bass fishing to the north country for years, and said the decision to create a second professional league will not adversely impact her community’s angling competition. In fact, she said the creation of a new pro tour could end up benefitting Waddington and the north country.

She said the Bass Master’s Elite Series has already committed to three more years at Waddington, a decision that was announced to crowd applause at this year’s elite tournament. And she said if experience has taught her anything in life, it’s that competition is almost always good.

As an example, she said that representatives of the MLF, the driving force behind the new $10 million Bass Pro Tour, have already reached out regarding the potential of having a tourney of their own in Waddington.

“This (pro fishing) is really booming for us, because now the MLF wants to come and do a tournament,” Ms. Otto-Cassada said. “For we locally, we could be seeing the same people, but from different organizations.”

Ms. Otto-Cassada said now that the professional fishing world has discovered the quality of the St. Lawrence River as a pro circuit venue, the sky — and the river’s majestic blue-green waters — are the limit.

“We now have three or four tournaments next year and the town of Massena now has three or four,” she said. “So this is moving and this is growing, and it is going to continue to be, I hope, an economic boom for St. Lawrence County.”

The Waddington mayor also said that as the sport grows in popularity, so will the interest of the next generation of both athletes and their fans.

“I believe the people from BASS have already gone through a second league before and I think they will survive,” she said. “And now, the younger fishermen will start getting their fans, just like the older ones and the more well-known names have.”

The lure of pro angling

In Waddington, as the sky turned pink and the clock neared the launch time of 6:15 a.m., VanDam and the other anglers wrapped up their Facebook and Instagram streaming, removed their caps and stood for the national anthem. Each of them was accompanied by a marshal, whose job it was to observe the rules and log estimated weights into an app called BASSTrakk. For one day, I acted as a marshal for VanDam.

On the St. Lawrence in August, VanDam’s blue eyes darted between a fish finder mounted in his console and the waves on the river. Having zoomed along for 40 minutes after launch, he reached a spot he deemed promising.

He cut the outboard engine, threw off his life jacket, leapt to the front of his boat, lowered his trolling motor and pitched out his first cast, all within a matter of seconds. Fishing as a cardio workout might sound laughable, but research published in 2008 found that professional anglers burn up to 4,300 calories during tournament days.

VanDam is tall, with cherubic cheeks and a tendency toward zealous winking.

Within minutes he had his first bite. “It’s a nice one,” he said, letting out a bit of line. When the fish had tired itself out, VanDam reeled it in, tipping his rod down close enough to the water that he could scoop the bass up in a sun-tanned hand.

It was about the size of a squished bread loaf, with a razor-sharp front dorsal fin and dark, tigrine stripes covering its shimmering bronze body.

VanDam’s sustained success seems to dispel the notion that luck plays a significant role in fishing. He has finished in the money in 252 of the 313 BASS tournaments in which he has competed. His winnings in the organization exceed those of Skeet Reese, the next-most-successful active Bassmaster Elite Series fisherman, by more than $3 million.

During his BASS career, VanDam has reeled in 11,827 pounds and 9 ounces of bass, equivalent to the weight of a medium-size African elephant. He has won the Bassmaster Classic four times, and Angler of the Year seven. In September, he was inducted into the Bass Fishing Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mo.

Since 1987, he said, the field has become far more skilled. “Really, for the first half of my career, there were a lot of anglers that had other jobs and did other things,” he said. “It wasn’t something they focused on 365 days a year.”

Today, most Elite Series anglers fish as a full-time occupation. In addition to the Bassmaster Elite Series and the new Bass Pro Tour, there is a third pro circuit, Fishing League Worldwide, which began the big-money era in 1996 by offering $100,000 to winners of regular-season events.

Bass fishing is one of the few professional sports in which top-tier participants must pay to play. Entry fees for the Bassmaster Elite Series in 2018 totaled $43,000, and that’s before the cost of travel, gear and gas. The BASS pro fishermen I spoke to in August and September estimated that their expenses totaled $65,000 to $80,000 per year.

They complained that payouts had decreased over the past decade. But since word of the Bass Pro Tour broke in September, BASS has offered a number of new incentives — including $20,000 early-signing bonuses and a guarantee to pay $2,500 per tournament even to anglers who finish dead last.

Despite the sweeteners, an early trickle of pros away from BASS quickly turned into a hemorrhage. Everyone I spoke to in professional bass fishing agreed that BASS has a tough few years ahead of it, with dozens of its biggest personalities gone, but would ultimately survive. The organization is not only a pro tour; it has amateur competitions and membership rolls of some 500,000 people.

In September, I reached VanDam in Missouri, a few days after he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. As far as he was concerned, he said, BASS would continue to be the “keeper of the culture.”

“Change is hard,” he added. “But this is going to be very positive for our overall sport. You have significant investments from all sides, and it’s pretty hard not to grow when you have that. When the water rises, all ships go with it.”

Staff writer Larry Robinson contributed to this report.

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Source: http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/news03/bass-fishing-sea-change-could-benefit-nny-20181028