Dennis Anderson: Fishing for dollars can be costly before big payoff

ON CASS LAKE — If you were Ted Takasaki or any of the other hundred or more professional walleye anglers on this lake last week, you understand that when the starting gun sounds, you fish rain or shine, cold or hot, calm seas or rough.

Too much money is at stake to stay at the dock, whatever the weather.

Tuesday, when I joined Takasaki, president of Lindy-Little Joe tackle company in Brainerd and a longtime professional fisherman, on Cass during the last day of pre-fishing for the Wal-Mart FLW walleye tournament here, the air was cold, the wind brisk ... and the fishing tough.

Ahead of the Cass Lake contest, Takasaki was in first place in the running for FLW Walleye Angler of the Year, a status gained by points earned on the FLW Walleye Tour this spring on Lake Erie and Lake Sharpe, S.D.

An Illinois native who about a decade ago chucked a promising career with a large electronics company to move to Minnesota to head up Lindy, Takasaki long dreamed of becoming a successful pro walleye angler.

In pro fishing, success is measured in part by the number of walleyes caught (bass, redfish and many other species-specific contests also are held nationwide). Securing sponsors is also a big deal -- huge, in fact -- as a way to defray costs that can mount quickly into the thousands of dollars for each tournament.

Case in point: Tuesday was Takasaki's fifth day of pre-fishing Cass ahead of last week's contest, which began Wednesday. At Cass, he shared a resort cabin with a few other pros to defer lodging costs. And the group cooked some of their own meals to cut food expenses.

"Gas has become a big deal," Takasaki said. "On Lake Sharpe, I ran 55 miles each day one way to fish. That cost me $185 a day just for boat gas."

As Takasaki spoke, he and I worked minnow-tipped jigs across a sand hump in Cass Lake covered with about 16 feet of water. Joining us was Joe Artim of Duluth, a UMD professor of business and finance and friend of Takasaki's who nurses his own dreams of turning pro.

Artim would fish the Cass Lake tournament as a "co-angler," or amateur, and as such would be randomly teamed each contest day with a different pro.

"I fished the In-Fisherman Professional Walleye Trail circuit as a pro in 2005," Artim said. "I hope to get back into it, but for now I'm competing on the co-angler side."

Entry fee for pros in the FLW contests is $1,500. Co-anglers pay $400.

"If I were to win, for example, I'd earn about $60,000," said Takasaki, who made a splash in the off season by switching boat companies. Previously he ran a Ranger. This year he opted for one of the new fiberglass boats built by Lund.

As a further complication -- you need a scoreboard to keep track of this stuff -- Takasaki runs a 250-horsepower Verado outboard made by Mercury.

"But if I had a Ranger boat and an Evinrude outboard and I won this tournament, I'd make $100,000, not $60,000," Takasaki said.

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The massive amount of pricey equipment required to be a pro angler and the extended periods of time necessary to be on site each tournament raise this question, among others:

Most pros simply smile when asked the question -- and quickly change the subject, preferring, apparently, to leave sleeping dogs lie.

But there are other questions, namely: What's the point? And what's in it for sponsors?

Takasaki says that for him and others in the tackle, boat or motor business, tournaments serve as important research and development centers. "No layman angler would ever push the equipment as hard as we do, and people in the industry learn from that," he said. "They also get feedback from us on what to improve, what to tweak."

Lindy, for example, makes a product called the Bait Tamer, which is a sort of mesh bag that floats in a bait well or live well and holds minnows or leeches. I've owned one for a long time, but I apparently never quite understood how to fully utilize the product until I fished with Takasaki last week.

He had not one but four Bait Tamers aboard, floating each in his live well. Each was a different color, and each held a different kind of bait.

Yet tournament fishing today would still be in the starting blocks, relatively speaking, were it not for television. Fishing near Takasaki's boat on Tuesday, for instance, was a pro who had "wrapped" his boat, turning it into a canary-yellow advertisement for Castrol motor oil.

Such "billboarding" makes sense, generally, only if that boat (or other, similarly decorated craft) ends up on TV when the contest is broadcast in September.

The bet, presumably, by Castrol is that the male-dominated audience that will watch the show will see the product-placement advertisement, and perhaps someday react favorably by purchasing Castrol.

Businessman Irwin Jacobs of the Twin Cities is behind a lot of this, and his FLW Outdoors sponsors hundreds of fishing contests nationwide, each of them made for TV.

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He did poorly the first day of the contest, he reported, but much better the second. He could be sitting prettier than he is ...

"But if I have a good day Friday, I can make the top 10 and be eligible to fish Saturday," he said.

As Takasaki talked on, it became ever more apparent that for him competitive fishing is primarily about just that: the competition.

And the challenge.

He can't stop thinking, for example, about where Cass Lake's walleyes might be, about how he can find them (his boat is outfitted with NASA-like electronics) and more importantly, how he can catch them (particularly the big ones) once he finds them.

Takasaki's voice trailed off, and he hung up.

And kept thinking.

The weekend winner Scott Steil of Richmond, Minn., won the four-day tournament on Saturday, catching 58 pounds, 2 ounces of walleyes and winning $60,000.

Takasaki finished three days of competitive fishing Friday with a total weight of 35 pounds, finishing 12th among 124 pro anglers. He missed the top-10 cutoff by .88 pounds.

Only the contest's top 10 anglers after three days qualified to fish Saturday.

Dennis Anderson danderson@startribune.com