In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places. Details are at www.maplecornermedia.com.
We are being pummeled on Lake Champlain rollers, taking a bucking bronco ride on a low-slung, 250-horsepower fiberglass steed. Yawing back and forth, visceral shudders rattling the bones and blasting the butt like a mule kick, it’s equal parts thrilling and alarming, hanging on for wind-blasted dear life at 40 mph just inches from a blur of blue water.
At the helm, Tommy Waltz looks over from the boat cockpit and, without a hint of irony, asks his rider-for-a-day if he wants to see what the boat is like at full throttle. That would be close to 80 mph, and a whole lot more aquatic violence and gas guzzling, maybe about three miles per gallon.
The offer is politely declined: 40 mph is plenty fast enough to experience – or is it suffer? – the Lake Champlain bass boat experience. But for Waltz, who lives in the far northern Vermont town of Georgia on Lake Champlain, there are days when he has no choice but to crank it up and submit to a marine version of chiropractic malpractice: It goes with the turf – make that liquid.
Welcome to the world of professional Vermont bass fishing. It’s less than a world, really, more like a sub-sub-culture or small but avid, odd and insanely addictive niche in the angling world. Addictive as in hook, line and sinker, rods, reels and lures, boat and massive motor, trailer, truck and human brain and body, all laser-focused on a silvery big-mouthed, badass-fighting fish with a voracious appetite that grows so big – five, six, seven pounds – they’re called “hogs.”
“Its hard for people to understand,” admits Waltz about his passion. “Most of the time I don’t really even try” to explain it, he says.
Waltz and his cohorts in bass mania are aware many Vermonters have no idea this even goes on, with a passion that shames a Brazilian soccer or Phish fan. Or that there are numerous bass fishing tournaments around Vermont and especially on Lake Champlain, which is listed No. 5 in all the U.S. on Bassmaster Magazine’s top 100 bass lakes. Or even that there is a Bassmaster Magazine, along with Vermont bass-fishing blogs, websites, the whole Internet/smartphone/cable channel kaboodle, let alone bass tournaments that dole out $35,000 prizes to winners wearing clothing with gear-emblazoned ads, sort of a piscine NASCAR.
“Sometimes when people hear you make money, they say, ‘What?’” says Waltz.
Waltz, who is 33 and married with a young child, happens to know something about numbers: The Skidmore graduate spends his life away from the water as a finance and numbers guy. He got his passion as a kid fishing with his dad around northern Vermont, but then left and went to the Boston area to work for six years and fishing “kind of faded out of my life.” After four years, bored with work, on a whim he went online and saw a boat for sale up in St. Albans. He bought it, fished all summer, and, “Next thing I know, I wanted to move back up to Vermont,” he says. In a “funny” twist, he now works for the guy who sold him the boat. “I bought a boat and got a job out of it,” he says with a laugh.
Which is a good thing, because getting into professional bass fishing requires dropping $10,000-$15,000 just to get started, even with a used boat and fishing gear. Ah yes, gear. Obsessive doesn’t begin to describe it. Waltz has, count ‘em, 12 fishing rods – six spinning and six bait casting – strapped to the boat, set up with different lures and plugs. (Time, in tournament fishing, is precious.) And then there’s all those lures. “You should see my garage. It’s just full of stuff,” he says with a chuckle.
We are talking about all this as Waltz casts relentlessly, our wild ride having brought us to a good fishing spot at the southern tip of Alburg. Waltz, a lean affable fellow with a shaved head under his ball cap and wearing sport shades, is pre-fishing from the bow of his sleek 21-foot boat, scoping out spots prior to a bass tournament on the upcoming weekend. Not just any tournament, as it happens. Along with Bill Spence, a 43-year-old air traffic controller who hails from St. Albans, the duo put their money and extensive time where their enthusiasm lies. They created their own tournament, the Champlain Bass Series.
Why? As Spence puts it, “I kind of got the hunger to do something” on his favorite lake. He calls Champlain a unique, complex, amazingly diverse, ever-variable and immensely prolific venue for bass fishing, from weedy shores and bays to clear rock ledges, shallows to deeps.
“There’s not anything as big and diverse anywhere,” says Spence, or as challenging.
Other tournaments make Champlain a stop on their tour, but the two Vermonters envisioned a completely Champlain-centric four-event tourney that would test Vermont’s best, up and down the lake in all seasons and conditions, returning all the entry money in payout. The overall winners would reign as sort of Champlain bass angling kings.
Spence and Waltz, who’d been a close fishing buddy for about five years, rounded up sponsors, contacted other hardcore bass aficionados, and somewhat to their surprise, the tourney took off (the last event is in Malletts Bay Sept. 22).
What is it about bass fishing that turns average anglers into fanatics? Southerner Jimmy Kennedy ran the iconic barbecue-oriented River Run Restaurant in Plainfield until 2010, when he decided to go off and join the pro bass tour. He’s done a lot of sports, including motocross racing. “But nothing compared to me about catching a big fish – or losing one. You’ll think about it for years,” he says. “Catching the big fish, or figuring something out, it’s a huge adrenalin rush.”
Spence sees another angle in tournaments. “Everyone used to be an athlete. We’re older now, and this is something we can compete at. It’s a way to fill the competitive edge we have,” he says.
There is no doubt that competitive spirit is sorely tested with bass fishing, a sport with a quirky, unpredictable yin and yang. Zoom all over Lake Champlain, then stop and tediously work a few hundred feet of shoreline or a submerged ridge, using a small foot-pedal operated electric motor to maneuver the boat. It’s hours of nothing, then minutes of excitement. A thrilling catch of lunkers, or a bunch of useless small fish (or time wasted carefully unhooking monster pike, like the one Waltz hauls in later in the day when he is scoping out Missisquoi Bay. )
The yin and yang applies also to wind and weather and temperature and of course, to temperamental fish.
The craziest part may well be the rush back make the weigh-in deadline with your five top bass (stored in aerated live wells and released after weigh-in). When the weather goes south, and inevitably it does on Champlain, getting back can be both harrowing and miserable. Waltz, for one, carries a hockey helmet with a plastic visor for days when pouring rain makes it feel like being hit with BB pellets in the boat’s open cockpit.
But he’s a fan with no regrets, an unquenched ardor, and now his own tournament to show it.
“I’ve got a sense of pride we’re pulling this off.”
