For the next seven months, every cast I make will have a purpose.
Every day on the water, every late night fiddling with tackle, every fish I catch – it’ll all be focused on doing my job on the Bassmaster Elite Series.
That’s why it was so important to me to spend three days on the water before the first Elite event with two of my favorite fishing partners: my mom, Carol, and my older brother Chris. We spent three days fishing Lake Logan Martin and Smith Lake, and even though the fishing was on the tough side, it was an opportunity that doesn’t come around enough these days.
I think most of you know how important my mom has been in my tournament fishing career: She was my tournament partner from the time we fished our first team tournament when I was 14, until I started fishing with friends more when I was 17. We used to fish together three times a week when I was a kid, but life has gotten pretty busy the past six or seven years, so my mom and I get to fish maybe one time a year these days.
Mom’s memories: Lake Castaic
Every time my mom and I fish together, we talk about fishing memories. Something will remind her of something that happened over 25 years ago, and she’ll start reminding me of details that I’d totally forgotten about.
Like our first tournament together on Lake Castaic, in 1988. Lake Castaic is a 2,400-acre lake north of Los Angeles that used to be this amazing big-bass fishery. It was 100 times better than Lake Falcon – you could catch 100, sometimes 200 fish a day there, and some big ones.
Mom and I had fished for years on “rent-a-boats” on Lake Piru, Casitas, Cachuma, Pyramid and Castaic, fishing for everything from redear to trout to stripers. You could rent these little 14-foot aluminum boats with 9-horsepower motors and a coffee can filled with cement for an anchor, and we had a ball in those boats. When I was 14, though, we went to North Hollywood Marina, got a Ranger 363V with a 150-horse Mercury and entered our first tournament on Castaic.
There were over 150 boats in that tournament, and we did … um … not good. I knew how to catch trout really good, but neither of us knew a thing about bass. We finished in the bottom quarter of the field, basically bombed, but that was our start as a tournament team. We got a lot better pretty fast, and won Angler of the Year honors the next year in the A.B.A. “Super Team,” a three-tournament series on those same lakes.
Mom’s memories: Lake Casitas
My mom likes to remind me of the first really giant bass I ever hooked, on Lake Casitas, near Santa Barbara. We were fishing 5-pound Maxima, a split shot and a little 2- or 3-inch worm, just dragging this teeny little thing around during the post-spawn. The water was really clear, and you could see all of these 10- and 12-pounders swimming around, and they wouldn’t eat anything!
I fished jigs a lot back then, and I couldn’t get anything to bite a jig, so I’d switched to this little worm on a tiny No. 4 hook. My mom and I both saw this giant fish swim under the boat, and the next thing I can remember, I kinda pulled on it and set the hook, and that fish took off into the trees, with me trying to fight it on 5-pound line.
We chased her with the boat, managed to pull her out into 40-foot of water, away from the bushes, and when she came to the surface, we saw that she was 16, maybe 17 pounds. I’d caught plenty of 9- and 10-pounders, but that fish was by far the biggest I had ever seen.
She ended up swimming 10 feet under the boat, and the line just broke as I was pulling – it was frayed from her teeth.
That was a traumatic story. My mom likes to refer to that fish as “Chucky” because it was so mean.
Mom’s memories: ‘Growing Pains’ on Calabasas Lake
Ask my mom about Calabasas Lake sometime, she’ll have a great story for you. Calabasas is a really wealthy neighborhood between Woodland Hills and Malibu, and I’d sneak in and walk the shorelines of the small lake there. I’d ride my bike down from our house in West Hills, hide it away somewhere, and scramble around the lake, hiding from the security guards.
They’d kick me out all the time. Remember Kirk Cameron from Growing Pains? He lived there, and I’d see him there often. The security guards knew me by then, and Kirk even asked them if they could just leave me alone and let me fish, but they still had to kick me out.
Mom’s memories: An amazing holiday bite
There’s one memory my mom brings up almost every time we fish together, of the best day of fishing she’s ever had. I think it was on Thanksgiving Day on Castaic, and we had a whole canyon completely to ourselves. We caught around 200 fish that day on ice jigs and spoons, basically catching fish on every cast in every direction for like a half a mile.
I think every fish in the lake was in that canyon, and we caught maybe 15 fish over 7 pounds that day. It was a pretty amazing day.
I tell my mom that she should fish at least two times a week, and I take her every chance I get when she visits us in Alabama. She caught some nice spotted bass last week, and even though she and Chris kept telling me “Aaron, you need to fish!” I kinda wanted to spend my time running the boat and watching them catch and hold fish.
It was really cool for me, and yet another great fishing memory made with my mom.