Newsletters

CASTAIC BASS CLUB NEWSLETTER

March 2006

Terry Kratzer, Editor

Meetings: 2nd Thursday of the Month
Next Meeting: March 9th at Hamburger Hamlet in Valencia
President, J.D. Dorsey: 661-259-5816, Secretary, Clyde and Carmen Crow: 661-269-5608,
Treasurer, Linda Taylor Bell: 818-838-0040, Vice President, Ron Licari,: 661-294-8393;
President’s Assistant, Mark O’Borsky: 661-257-0508; Weigh Master, Mike Forslund: 661-
257-0186, Newsletter, Terry Kratzer: 818-635-4342

Dateline-February 12th, 2006 Lake Piru
14 teams came together for the second tournament of the 2006 CBC circuit on the stingy
waters of Piru Lake. On the strength of another Huddleston Hawg Jeff bested the field for a
second straight month. Someone please steal these lures from him before the next event!

Taking second were Doug and Ralph Jr. with four fish weighing 5.17 lbs. Rumor has it that
Ralph’s Dad told his son where to fish, and his son completely ignored him, which led to their
success. Great job guys!

Grabbing third were Mike Munson and J.D. with two fish weighing 4.66lbs. Munson said that
when J.D. got rid of his Oklahoma sweatshirt the fish finally started biting. Great job guys!

Two of the more exciting events of the day were Lander catching a three pound goldfish and
Karl witnessing two rattlesnakes mating on the shore. He said he really lost his concentration
after that one!

Last meeting
The speaker at our last meeting was noted Western Pro Ray Layerly who spoke on a variety
of techniques. A huge thanks to Ray for donating some great product for our raffle, and
thanks to Grant for donating product as well. Thanks again guys!!

Our next meeting will hopefully feature a few club members speaking as we have some very
talented anglers who have plenty to offer, including how to catch big Koi!I also hope to hear
Doug talk about his recent trip to South Florida. Our next tournament will be at Castitas on
March 12th with a non-boater fee of $35. We’ll all have to gather at the snack shack
afterwards for some great camaraderie and fish stories!

BBQ’s
We will fire up the grill for the National Bass events at the West Ramp on March 11th and
25th. We’ll need volunteers to help out with these fundraisers, which generally start around
3PM and go till about 4:30PM.

FOCL float tube derby....
will be taking place at the Lower Lagoon on April 8th from 7AM till noon. C’mon out and drop
a float tube in the water and competer for only $40 or bring your boat out as we will need
volunteers to help weigh fish for the tubers.

A little club history-you think things are a bit rough now?!! You should been here
before....
I am well aware that we certainly do not have a perfect club, and there is always a little
complaint or two about how things went after a tournament. Still, I think that we need to
remember a few things about our club, but before we do this, lets take a look at the past. I
am in my 13th season in the club, so if you think things are not perfect now, let’s take a ride
in the time machine.

My first full year in the club was 1994. For that year and most of the next year, I was just a
little ole’ member, not an officer, just staying out of the politics and going out fishing. Things
seemed to be going along pretty well, but sometimes things didn’t seem to be organized and
the meetings were starting to become complaint sessions.
Starting in 1996 we still had a good group of people who seemed to really enjoy fishing
together once a month. Yet, the meetings had very little agenda and were becoming one big
argument. Late that year we had elections and I was voted in as Vice President and
tournament director. So now I felt like I had a real start on trying to turn the club around.
Little did I know what I was in store for!

Two months into 1997 I suddenly found myself in charge as the President of the club! I made
a few changes (I guess that’s the liberal coming out in me), but I wanted to keep some things
the same as well (I am conservative at times as well)! The biggest problem was getting a
handle on the meetings. In the past we decided which lake to fish at the meeting the week
before the tournament, and argued for at least 15 or 20 minutes about this every month.
Fortunately we decided in late 1996 to actually follow our by-laws and pick the lakes for the
whole year in advance. This cut down on a ton of complaining.

We also started having executive meetings prior to the club meetings to hash out potential
problems before they got started, as well as getting an agenda ready for each meeting to
make them run a little more smoothly. At that time I also found out that the club might not
have the greatest reputation within the community. A private group had tried at one point to
come in with a proposal of turning the Castaic Lagoon into another Irvine Lake, by stocking
tons of huge trout and catfish, then putting up a fence around it and charging exorbenent
fees for public access. Well, guess what-a former club member told several newspapers,
including Western Outdoor News, that “hardcore members of the Castaic Bass Club are in
favor of this proposal.”

Are you kidding me? No way!! We had to put retractions in these papers, and when one of
our members stood up at a local town hall meeting and said we were not in favor of the
proposal, it was met with thunderous applause! Yet, we had another problem. At some past
local fundraisers, we had a couple of members who embarrassed the club by being drunk
and acting obnoxious at some of these events. So we couldn’t have any fundraisers either.
So, here I was stuck, with a club that actually was in debt in early 1997, with just about no
way to get out of it!!

The first step I took to correct these problems was to join the Friends of Castaic Lake. I
figured that we could eventually get some fundraisers going with the FOCL, and could
eventually start to improve our reputation. I really wanted to get some new shirts and hats for
the club but had no way to afford them. Incredibly, one of our newest members was able to
get an outside sponsor to help us out. So, we were able to get 48 t-shirts, 48 polo shirts,
and 48 hats-all for absolutely nothing! They were free! One small hitch-we had to have a
minor logo change as the old logo had too much lettering, making it impossible to embroider
legibly. Well, a few of our members went really conservative on me, and didn’t want to accept
this logo change! That’s right, $1800 worth of stuff for nothing, and they didn’t want to
accept it!! So those folks left the club, eventually trying to take most of our boaters with
them. In fact, rumor even had it that one of those members had thought about coming to one
of our meetings a few months later in order to make a motion that we disband the club and
divide the few club funds we had amongst the members. What nerve! The former member
never showed....and they tried to form another club, which failed miserably, I bet you can’t
imagine why....
So, as 1997 drew to a close and we only had about 16 members with very little money in the
bank, I tried to reflect back on the experiences of the past year. Of course, we had very little
money, mostly because we had no fundraisers. We had tried to have a couple of newspaper
and aluminum can drives but only about half of the members took part, with several other
members making fun of the effort. As you can well imagine, our poor reputation led to us
having prizes for the top five finishers at the year end banquet-that’s it! Nobody else got
anything at this dinner that we could barely afford in the first place. So, lets move on to
1998....

Things started looking up slightly in 1998. We had put club brochures out in several tackle
shops, picked up a couple more sponsors, and got a few new members. Yet, we were only
averaging five or six boats at our events, and were non-boater heavy. One member kept
having this fantasy about the club renting boats at each event, and when he didn’t like
people disagreeing with him, he stomped out of an executive meeting, slamming the door on
the house of the host. He never did apologize for this act and barely even acknowledged
that he had done it. As far as I was concerned, we had our lowest point that August, when, in
the middle of a great topwater bite following a high water El Nino’ year at Castaic, we were
only able to draw about four boats at Cachuma, even though we had a campsite reserved.
Yet, we started to see some light at the end of the tunnel that winter when we got a ton of
stuff for the banquet, and were able to give out gifts to the top ten finishers.

In 1999, I was no longer on the executive committee, but still strived to improve things as
much as I could. We had just finished working the Love Ride for a second straight year,
which got us some more funds. It was then that Karl came up with the idea of running a
fundraiser BBQ at the FOCL night tournaments. Joining the Friends was starting to pay off!
We also picked up more sponsors, with plenty of prizes to go around at future banquets, and
even were starting to have an occasional club raffle when we could. And we started having
team tournaments, when both people in the boat competed together instead of against one
another. This worked well at first (even though one member left the club as he said he could
“no longer make a profit that way”, making me wonder who joins a club to make a profit in the
first place), yet another disturbing pattern started to evolve-possible cheating.

We had always had paper weigh-ins, so rarely were any fish brought to the ramp at
tournaments end. Late in 1999, we had a couple of guys who totally outfished the field, yet
offered very few details. The grumbling started in earnest in 2000 when two guys got paired
up twice during that same calendar year, and won going away both times. It was at that time
that we knew we had to start having live weigh ins. Naturally, these guys didn’t rejoin the
following year. Also, the guy who slammed the door at the executive meeting somehow
decided that he would be the official record keeper for the club, and started collecting weigh
slips at the end of each tournament. Yet after a while people got sick of the guy and his
outbursts at both meetings and tournaments and stopped giving him their weight slips. This
action, along with the fact that he got sued toward the end of the year by another club
member (that’s another story altogether) made him do what we had been trying to get him to
do for a long time-quit the club!!

I believe the club really started to turn the corner in 2001. We started having live weigh-ins,
which were not only exciting to watch, but also took away any thoughts of inproprieties. We
had plenty of sponsors, our challenge tournament was getting bigger and better every year,
and the BBQ’s, along with frequent raffles, were allowing us to go on camping trips every
year, and were funding some great year-end banquets. We also had more members, and
starting in 2002, we frequently saw more than 10 boats at most tournaments. A lot of the rif
raf was gone from the club, and some solid people were joining.

Since then, the club has been under steady and bright leadership, we constantly average
double digit boat fields at tournaments, and we are greatly respected in not only the bass
fishing community but in the general local community as well. We have had more than one
guest speaker who says that our club is their favorite to speak to. Think about what I have
written here, think about it hard. I only hit the tip of the iceberg when describing all the
garbage this club had to go through to survive. If you are not having fun now, think about
what it might have been like in years past. This club is better than ever now, stick around
and enjoy the ride.

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