Editor's Log
Electronic Greetings from Yamamoto Central!
Mar. 17, 2008
Once again I find myself doing a little musing about the past as the evolution of the Inside Line project continues. This time out I thought I’d take a few minutes to fill in a few of the details about how the magazine came to be, and how I met the man who made it all possible.
In the online debut of the Inside Line I made mention of a group of persons that set out to publish a magazine, admittedly with limited prior experience or training to prepare them for such a task. Okay, with the exception of one layout guy the sad fact was that we had exactly no experience with producing a magazine. We were the rankest of amateurs but we shared a passion for fishing and were blessed to have a benefactor with a little sideline bait business – you may have even heard of him, his name is Gary Yamamoto.
At the start of the project I was a full-time guide on Lake Powell and totally dependant on Yamamoto products for one simple reason - they worked which made my job easier, and as everyone knows old lazy guys like me will always go for the easy way out.
Understand, I’d never met that Yamamoto guy, but I’d seen him from a distance out on the lake. You see, we hung out in many of the same areas on Powell, very often in areas and at the time of day when civilians were mighty scarce – i.e.: Not a camp in sight and too far from any marina to make it back comfortably before dark. Yamamoto was running a campground and a bait business and I was doing guide trips every day – neither of us had many opportunities to pre-fish without doing so out of a stolen hour here or there prior to sundown.
While neither of us advocated nighttime boating, then or now, many a night we ended up coming out of a side canyon to see the other just ahead in the main channel. So there we’d be, single file, wide open, headed back home from the San Juan arm as the last glimmer of twilight surrendered to the desert night – a Champion and a Ranger slicing through the inky blackness toward the lights of Wahweap Marina blinking in the distance.
A few months later, just as I headed around a steep point about 90 miles uplake in the upper San Juan, I finally met Gary Yamamoto - or maybe I should say that we sort of met each other, quite literally. It was about an hour before dark and we were both hurrying as we rounded the same point from opposite directions, both on high bypass on the trolling motors and both intent on locating the bass and then heading home before it got any later.
We managed to avoid the imminent collision, but then we circled, both of us accusing the other of being in “my spot”. Neither of us got anywhere with that tack. He said he knew who I was (not too tough as I had Bubba’s Guide Service plastered all over the windshield of my Ranger). I told him I knew who he was, too (not too tough either – Hell, I had about a grand worth of his baits in the boat with me for one reason, and two, Japanese American guys in 20-foot Champions were pretty scarce in the desert back then).
I told Yamamoto that I used his stuff and he said he knew that; he’d read my weekly newspaper columns. Back then I was spinning yarns to promote my guide service and I’ve never had any better sense than to just tell the truth – I wrote about what I used, and what I used was Yamamoto grubs, a lot of Yamamoto grubs.
But back to that very late afternoon in Alcove Canyon – by the time we finally pulled out for the long ride home we’d played show-and-tell with our soft plastics supply and talked hooks and line, standard fisherman-to-fisherman doo-dah, and Gary had given me a big trash bag load of two-tone (187 body - 156 tail) six-inch worms that he’d been fiddling around with for a while (thank you Lord).
Given the time frame (1988) those would have been the old Yamamoto Triple S worm variety (super soft and salty) that were typically carded and shrunk wrapped ten to the pack. The trash bag he gave me that evening probably contained a couple of thousand worms that Gary called his “seconds”.
When we discussed the bite I was on for my clients Yamamoto showed me how to make two suggested modifications to the worms – pinch about a half-inch off the pointed nose section and then pinch off about half of the curl tail, right in the widest section of the tail. The end result was a blunt-nosed worm with a flat tail widest at the end. Oh, and the overall length was pretty close to 5½ inches overall.
Those of you hard-core bait freaks out there in www-ville have probably already solved the mystery – yes, that was 20 years ago, and yes, what Yamamoto created out there on the Lake that evening was what today is called a Kut-Tail worm.
In the next week I had phenomenal luck T-rigging the little truncated worms on a size 1 straight-shank hook (a Klein black Weapon as I recall), with a 3/16-ounce worm weight and a faceted glass bead, Iovino style. I had my clients making long casts with ten-pound line, parallel to the towering walls at Powell, particularly in the shade. As the bait sunk I had them shaking the bait (more Iovino doodle-meister stuff) as it made its pendulum swing down the wall, this accomplished while making absolute minimum line retrieval.
The net result was my amateur clients were catching lots of bass, with relative ease, to as deep as 50 feet – an awesome feat for what were near beginners in many cases, and the method was a great one for tyros as well as those more adept with deep water techniques.
I ran into Gary about a couple of weeks later and he asked for a report. I told him he could read all about it in Wednesday’s newspaper but the fact was his worms had quit working. Of course he wanted to know why, so I told him they quit working the minute the trash bag went empty. That remark occasioned my first trip to Yamamoto’s plant for a reload out of his private stash of “seconds”.
That was about 20 years ago, and the beginning of a friendship that proved to be one of the most gratifying and beneficial of my life, and one that led to the creation of the entire Inside Line project, along with many other fun projects. Over the next few months I’ll dust off some of the old memories and share them with you.
Thanks to Gary Yamamoto and his willingness to pick up the tab, we’ve had the opportunity to share the fun of fishing with a whole lot of folks. To this day it’s been one amazing ride. Thank you, Gary.
Good fishin’
Jerry Puckett