Eli Karon How do you keep a fish from
smelling? Karon suggests cutting its nose off. For other fishing
tips, e-mail Karon at fishingfan21@yahoo.com.
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Fishermen are a strange lot. They lie, they’re dirty, they
lie, they smell, and they lie.
When I drop a line, I expect it to come up with something more
than an old boot or an empty hook, even if it takes all day.
But if my line does come up with an old boot on the end of it,
you’ll hear about the 18-inch trout I fought for twenty
minutes on two-pound test line. Fishing tournaments are a great way
to generate fishing stories.
For one weekend every year, Lake Cachuma hosts an annual trout
fishing derby. The derby has numerous rules, but the most important
ones involve money.
The lake is stocked with 50,000 pounds of rainbow trout, some
randomly marked with special tags behind their dorsal fins.
The lucky fisherman who catches such a fish reports his or her
catch to the tournament headquarters. The tag is then scanned to
see what number it was, and the highest number wins $3,000.
No, I didn’t tack on an extra zero there. Three thousand
Benjamins for catching a frickin’ fish. And all this is based
on the number of a little tag placed behind the dorsal fin of a few
unlucky trout.
When you really think about it, it’s not fair. You see,
some of the trout have a slight chance to survive the tournament,
even if they’re hooked. But not the ones with tags.
You don’t know what number the fish is until you bring it
in, and by that time it’s about as dead as the Detroit Tigers
in March.
If you think about it further, this is the insecure male’s
ultimate dream: Size doesn’t matter. With this in mind, some
friends and I headed up to Ojai for a weekend of fishing, camping,
eating, drinking and more fishing.
Now, there are two main types of camping: Beverly Hills camping
and backwoods Texas-style camping. At the Lake Cachuma Trout Derby,
both methods are offered.
Beverly Hills camping consists of taking your $75,000 camper to
a lake- or other-designated camping area and hooking it up to a
generator for electricity. You must bring fine china and
silverware, take hot showers after using flush toilets in bathrooms
that are twice the size of dorm rooms, and cook in a full-sized
stove that could fit Hansel and Gretel. I won’t even get into
the sleeping arrangements.
Pride and the fact that I’m ““ thankfully ““ not
from Beverly Hills saved me the embarrassment of a superficial
camping trip. Instead, we opted for a backwoods Texas-style
excursion.
We arrived at the lake at 1 am. All the campsites were sold out,
and we would have turned around if the sign reading “Overflow
campsites available” hadn’t been placed at the
entrance.
We took two cars to the campsite, with fishing/camping equipment
in one car and food in the other. When we got there, half the food
had mysteriously disappeared, and the passengers of the “food
car” emerged amid a cloud of smoke, giggling like a trio of
drunken hyenas.
“So this is what backwoods Texas-style camping is all
about,” I thought to myself. So far it was more of a
Humboldt-style camping trip.
When all was said and done it was 3 a.m., and we had one crooked
tent and half the food we’d started with. So we did what
comes naturally to any rugged individual sleeping in the wilderness
beneath the stars: we set our cell phones to go off at 5 a.m.,
hoping to get out on the lake before anyone else.
Though none of us had been up at 5 a.m. since our junior high
school paper routes, the cell phones changed that with a cacophony
of obnoxious beeping.
So then I was more tired than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking
contest, hungrier than Calista Flockhart, and our neighbors were
starting to glare at us as if we gave them their hangovers. It was
going to be a long trip.
The fishing derby got off to a forgettable start, with three of
us frying bacon with a portable stove and trying to restore feeling
in our hands. When the bacon was gone and the sun came up, we
moved. And that’s when the fishing got considerably
better.
The time was 7:47 a.m., and “fish on!” was the cry
of the morning. By 9:00 a.m., we had a full stringer, a sun tan (it
was 85 degrees), and the other two members of our group had arrived
at the lake.
Luckily for me and my brother (two of the three early-risers),
we were kept company by the theme songs from “Bill Dance
Outdoors” and “Fishing with Roland Martin,”
graciously crowed by the other early-bird, a 25-year-old UCLA
alumnus.
When the late sleepers joined us, one of them was whining
because he actually was from Beverly Hills, and he expected the
whole warm showers, full bathroom type of outing. The other guy was
from a town that starts with a “C,” ends in an
“o,” and in the middle you got a “hicag.”
Besides being paler than an ill albino, he came ready to fish.
Throughout the day we caught in excess of 20 trout, all of them
in the 10-16-inch range.
Some of the fish were eaten for lunch and dinner, since half of
our food was gone, while others were given away. Of the fish we
gave away, four went to a 10-year-old kid with a reverse mullet.
I’m talking party up front, business in the back, rather than
the other way around. Two fish were given to an old-timer, and by
old I mean ancient.
I guess it’s true ““ old fishermen never die, they
just smell that way.
We attempted to release as many fish as possible, but swallowed
hooks make this humane act impossible.
The trout derby at Lake Cachuma was incredible; none of the fish
we caught were eligible to win the three grand, I got sunburned and
gnawed on by mosquitoes, and the guy right next to us caught the
winning fish.
Catching your own dinner is one thing. Being forced to catch
your own dinner as a result of a few individuals’ herbal
compulsions is quite another.
The lake is fairly close, about an hour and a half from UCLA.
The fees are minimal, the weather is amazing, and the fishing is
insane. Plus, we all know that the worst day of fishing is better
than the best day of doing anything else, period.