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'Reel' women recast a sport
Pro bass fishing, once dominated by men, is now hooking women competitors.
By Clayton Collins | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the February 23, 2007 edition
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Dianna Clark remembers the giant turtle that almost caught her cousin. America's top-ranked female bass angler, Ms. Clark will cast and reel from her high-tech Triton boat this weekend on Lake Mitchell, near Birmingham, Ala., hoping to land some scale-straining lunkers in a three-day event that's being hailed by the sport-fishing community as a coming of age for professional women anglers.
But ask Clark about a standout fishing memory and she harks back to age 10 and the summer day when she and a cousin her age, Linda, rode to a creek west of Dodge City, Kan.
"I held the poles and she steered the horse," recalls Clark, who now lives in Bumpus Mills, Tenn.
The pair soon began hooking brem – any of a variety of sunfish – adding the fish they caught to a stringer staked to the bank. Then, from just downstream, Clark saw the turtle surface and angle sharply toward the bank.
"I hollered at Linda, 'Pull the fish out of the water!' " Clark says. "Minutes later she's screaming 'Dianna, Dianna!' – and playing tug of war."
Fans and fellow anglers are the ones likely to be calling to her these days. Clark is one of a number of women professionals – many of them Southerners – earning well into six figures as they don sponsor-labeled garb and compete on tournament circuits called "trails."
The 2007 season is just under way, having kicked off at Lake Amistad in Del Rio, Texas, earlier this month. It will run through September. This weekend's championship (Feb. 22-24) caps the 2006 – and first – season of the Women's Bassmaster Tour (WBT).
"This gives us ladies the exposure we have needed for a long time," says Sammie Jo Denyes, a pro angler from Baker, Fla.
"These are history-makers," says Bruce Mathis, WBT director. "They've been waiting for years for something at this level." The WBT is sanctioned by the Bass Angler Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) and its parent, ESPN. It coincides with fishing's Super Bowl equivalent, the CITGO Bassmaster Classic, on nearby Lay Lake.
That event – a catch-and-release contest, as has been B.A.S.S. policy since 1972 – has yet to have a woman entrant because none has yet qualified by racking up sufficient wins in B.A.S.S.'s Elite Series. Tournament fishing has been a male-dominated sport since it took off in Texas in the mid-1950s.
Not that women haven't made their mark. Michigan angler Renee Flesh won a national championship event in Alabama in 2001. Vojai Reed, of Oklahoma, cracked into Bassmaster events fully 10 years before that.
And few women anglers fail to mention Sugar Ferris, who pioneered women's tournament fishing in the 1970s and, with her husband, Bob, ran the Bass 'N Gals tour. It ended in 1998, just as the Women's Bass Fishing Association began a seven-year run under Willie and Carole Cook.
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