The week after my article about trying to land Big Bertha, a 10-pound-plus calico bass caught on a fly, appeared in the May/June 2016 issue of California Fly Fisher, something pretty spectacular happened to me. I was fly fishing with another IGFA world record holder, my friend Dr. John Whitaker. Using big flies, we were targeting big fish holding in big structure. We started early and launched around 4:00 a.m. in the dark, thinking the early dawn bite would be epic, but as luck would have it, we didn’t even get a touch.
We had worked a large stretch of prime real estate and had nothing to show for it. We looked at each other, because something weird was going on. We were both perplexed, but all we needed was one big fish to make our day, and we both agreed that anything tugging on the line would have been welcome. In retrospect it was the calm before the storm.
I decided to change my fly to something a little smaller. I put on one of my articulated brown FishSkull sculpin-head flies, one without a powder-coated head. The entire morning, I tried to stay focused on my fishing and silently repeated my mantra, “Be ready, be ready, be ready.” On the third cast over a small boiler rock, my line stopped, and I immediately pointed my rod at the fish and clamped down with my line hand on the rod. I told myself, “Do not let go!” It was going to be a tug of war.
Because of their length, fly rods don’t have good leverage, so pointing the stick at the fish and holding on was my only way of breaking this fish’s spirit and stopping it from going anywhere. If I’d lifted the rod on the hook set, the game would have been over. After what seemed like an eternity — maybe 15 seconds — I slowly swung my rod to the side with my body to pull the fish away from where she lived. Once I was able to do this, I gained about a foot and a half of space. This is when I made my move and quickly stripped twice to lock in my position. She tried to make another desperate attempt to go home, and I thought that either she would break me off or I might have a chance to turn her.
She didn’t like not having control, but she started to turn my way, her spirit broken. I immediately stripped in two more quick strips and clamped down on the line again, this time with both hands. I felt her start to give in, and I continued putting side pressure until she let me strip more line and she surfaced.
When she came to the surface, John and I both knew she was a record, but had no idea how big she was. John made a great net shot, and it was high fives and a couple of holy &*^%s before the reality of what had happened finally sank in. She was 24 inches long with a 19-inch girth and weighed in at 9.23 pounds — the largest calico bass ever taken thus far on a fly. She wasn’t quite Big Bertha, but she definitely was her younger teenage sister, a girl with an attitude. The moral of the story: dream big and be prepared. You never know when Big Bertha will come out to play.
