The Fish Hack looks East and goobers onto the expertise of one Monte Burke to tell the tale of why Saturday means so much to Fish Heads just about anywhere except in Salmon Nation of the Pacific Northwest.
Burke is a fellow Hack, at Forbes Magazine of all places. Forbes is no cage-liner, and not just because of the glossy paper’s poor absorption rates. So Burke’s penance for being a Hack is to live forever in doctors’ offices, his articles serving as that last distraction before a root canal.
Still, Monte Burke is the Dude du Jour this June 2. For you Nor’westers, that’s the 75th anniversary of George Washington Perry’s catching the world record largemouth bass of 22 pounds, 4 ounces.
Burke chronicles Perry’s catch and the decades-old rush to beat it in the best book ever written about bass fishing — “Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World Record Largemouth Bass.”
Seems ol’ Perry decided it was too wet to plow his Georgia field that day. Yada yada yada, he catches some mondo largemouth that, really, is no bigger than a run-of-the-mill Rogue River spring chinook. But a good sized Chetco River steelhead nonetheless.
Yet in salmon-less environs like the South, dudes measure their manliness by the length of their bass. Evidently, there’s been this 75-year throw-down ever since over who will top Farmer Perry.
They pursue what they call “Sowbelly,” that nearly mythical bass with a pig-like girth. In the book, Burke devotes a chapter to Perry and the rest of it to interviews with near-missers, some dude in Alabama who chose divorce over fishing and even a Texas biologist trying to build a robo-bass in a lab.
Burke tells The Fish Hack that he believes the record, which almost fell last year in California, could crack any day.
“Of course, we’ve been saying that now for nearly 75 years,” Burke says.
The Fish Hack isn’t into promotion, unless the term “self” is in front. But Burke is a Fish Hack blog-head, and it never hurts to hurl back a little love — especially since he’s out-hacked every Fish Wrapper alive on this Sowbelly saga.
Burke slipped me the ol’ oh-by-the-way line that Sowbelly — SURPRISE! — is now out in paperback. So its available for a little less coin at your local Book Rack.
But don’t worry. Even in what publishers call “softcover,” you still get The Full Monte.
