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The ORRC reports also created the now-defunct Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, which supported a lot of natural-resources professionals, including myself, with grant money until it was shelved in l981. One of the tasks of the BOR was to make more projections. We crunched a lot of numbers, and saw a rosy future for an ever-growing outdoor-recreation industry. But what no one saw was the explosion in fishing tournaments, including the emergence of a new professional athlete — the bass pro. There are now over
35 million sport fishermen in the U.S.; more anglers than golfers or tennis
players. And we can only count the licensed anglers. Many seniors, saltwater
anglers, children, and members of the military do not need to buy a license
to fish. Their impact on the economy varies according to whom you talk
with — but it is huge. A 1999 USDA Forest Service report estimates
the direct expenditures of fishermen as $37.8 billion per year. The U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service says $36 billion. That's just direct expenditures.
Just walk into the giant Bass
Pro Shops Outdoor World in Springfield, Mo. — it's larger than
four football fields — and look at the selection of rods, reels,
lures, boats, clothing, sunscreen, ice chests, and frying pans. If you
do, you'll understand why the total impact of all the fishermen and the
industry that supports them is estimated at well over $100 billion. There have been fishing contests since Izaak Walton's days, but the size of the prizes and the number of contests make competitive fishing such a bigger deal today. People fish for all
kinds of species, but according to Chris Murray of B.A.S.S., which runs
the CITGO
Bassmasters Tournament Circuit, of those 35 million licensed sport
fishermen, 29.7 million pursue freshwater bass: largemouths, smallmouths,
spotteds, and on down the line. In a typical professional-bass-fishing event, you spend eight hours a day on the water. No live bait is allowed. The total poundage of fish caught determines the winner, and the limit is five per day. Fish are kept alive and released after being weighed. If you check in with a dead bass, there is an eight-ounce deduction. There are probably 700 pro-bass fishermen, 175 of which are in the top tier. In contrast to a pro golfer, who needs a set of clubs, a bag, and a caddie, to be able to compete, a bass pro must invest a fair chunk of change to be competitive on the water — the major share of which goes into a boat. I remember saving up enough to buy a boat and outboard to fish on Lake Erie in the l950s. The package went for about $350 in those days. According to Chris Murray, today's serious recreational bass boat and motor combos start around $6,000. And a pro-bass-fisherman's boat will go upwards of $30,000, the engine being a major expense. Today's bass boats go faster than the small hydroplanes I used to race as a kid. Sixty miles an hour is not uncommon for a pro's boat. Why so fast? Time is money. According to Murray, a typical tournament day is 6:30 A.M. to 2 P.M. The quicker you get to the spot you want to fish, the greater your chances to catch more fish. And you are due back at the check-in on or before the closing time. For every minute you are late, you lose a pound off your daily catch. If you are 15 minutes late, you lose your daily catch poundage. The economic impact of fishing tournaments is another reason why they're so popular. Communities love hosting them. According to research by BASS, a town that hosts such a tournament will bring in over $600,000 in direct expenditures, and there are 19 top-level tournaments a year on the BASS CITGO circuit, not to mention other circuits for bass, as well as three similar circuits for walleyes. The Walleye
Central website, which had over seven million inquiries in February
alone, lists 29 different walleye fishing contests, ranging from a single
tournament to a whole circuit. The prizes are not as large as for pro-bass
tournaments, but the Cabela's
National Walleye Team Championship, which was held last May in Lake
Mille Lacs, Minn., had 250 teams vying for $144,000 in prizes with a $25,000
First Prize. Buckminster Fuller used to say that we ought to pay some people to go fishing. He was of course talking about politicians, but it's ironic that today a person can make more money fishing than they can as an elected official. —
Mr.
Swan is the “Media Watch” columnist for North
American Hunter
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he National Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission was formed
in l958 to inventory the nation's outdoor-recreation resources and make
projections of trends through 1976 and 2000. Among other things, the ORRC
reports, which were issued in 1962, led to the creation of user fees for
national parks and recreation areas, as well as billions of dollars of
federal spending.
