Another Lake Dixon hog

[EL CAZADOR]

By Ed Zieralski, San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

June 3, 2003

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Say one thing about that huge, history-making largemouth bass caught Saturday at Dixon Lake. It's moving up on the charts.

It turns out that Jed Dickerson's 21.70-pound largemouth, the fourth-heaviest bass ever caught in the world, may have been the same bass caught by big-bass hunter Mike Long on April 27, 2001, at Dixon Lake.

Long was asked Saturday if Dickerson's bass might be the same bass, a 20.75-pounder that Long caught and released at Dixon, but Long said he didn't believe it was.

But upon further review . . . and after looking at the film . .

"It's the same bass I released in 2001," Long said. "When I first saw it, I didn't think it was, but after I got my pictures back, I could see that it had the same black dot on the right lower side of its cheek that mine did."

Dickerson's bass, a potential International Game Fish Association line-class, world-record catch on 20-pound line, measured 281/2 inches long and sported a 263/4-inch girth.

If Dickerson's bass is the same largemouth Long landed and released, it has lost a bit of its waistline and grown some length. Long's bass caught in 2001 was, as Long referred to it then, "a perfect bass; it looked like it swallowed a basketball."

Long's bass measured 27 inches long, 11/2 inches less than Dickerson's, and had a girth of 27 inches, 1/4-inch more than Dickerson's.

"There are just a whole bunch of the same identifying marks that the bass I caught had," Long said. "It's the same bass, just bigger now."

Dickerson celebrated his big catch by returning to Dixon yesterday to try for another bass. He plans to submit the catch to the IGFA to be considered for a line-class world record for 20-pound test line. The present mark is a 19-pounder caught by Dan Kadota in 1989 at Castaic.

Dickerson, 30, of Carlsbad, didn't realize his catch shattered that mark until a reporter told him about it later in the day.

"It's all starting to hit me right now," he said. "This is something I've wanted to do for three years, but it's like, when I finally did it, I didn't know what to say."

Dickerson released the record bass later in the morning, and he said it swam away powerfully.

"She swam straight out and down, which is good," he said.

Dickerson said he had a premonition that he might catch a huge bass on Saturday.

"I fished the same week last year, the last week of May, and I caught an 111/2-, a 131/2-and a 141/2-pounder," Dickerson said. "I lost a huge bass in that same period. I think it was as big or bigger than this one."

He said he plans to contact all the companies that made the equipment he used to catch the bass. He used a Mission Fish, a plastic imitation trout-pattern swimbait, on 20-pound P-Line, spooled on a Calcutta 400 reel and G-Loomis Muskie Light Bucktail rod. Companies often give product, cash and appearance fees to anglers who use their gear to catch historic fish.

And there isn't a fish around right now that has more history than this bass, once possibly the eighth-heaviest bass in the world, but certainly now fourth on the big-bass chart.

"See, catch and release works," Long said.

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MONSTER BASS, SPORTS FAIR, SILVERWOOD -- Jim Matthews column 4jun03

Near-world record bass caught from Escondido's Dixon

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Bart Crabb was right. The ornery Midwesterner who authored "The Quest for the World Record Bass" liked to confide in friends that Lake Dixon, a small, 60-acre lake on the outskirts of Escondido, was his pick to produce the next world record largemouth bass.

Crabb, who passed away last year, would be thrilled with the news from the past two weeks. First, Mac Weakley of Carlsbad landed a 19-pound, seven-ounce largemouth, a fish that is one of the 15 largest ever caught by an angler. Then this past Saturday, Jed Dickerson, also of Carlsbad and a buddy of Weakley's, landed a 21-pound, 11-ounce largemouth. It is the fourth-largest bass ever caught by an angler and only nine ounces off of the 22-pound, four-ounce world record.

Both Weakley and Dickerson released their bass after they were weighed on certified scales.

Dickerson said he'd found the fish the evening before while fishing and came back the next morning to the same area, but the fish wasn't there. He decided to check a nearby "hole in the weeds" that he'd been checking all spring for big fish, and the huge bass was there. After nearly and hour of throwing a big eight-inch swim bait in and around the fish, it "kept getting more and more agitated, and when it started doing 10 foot loops around the bait and coming right up to it, I knew it was just a matter of time before she took it."

News of the catch spread quickly in the bass crowd, and Mike Long, a Poway resident who held the lake record at Dixon with a 20-pound, 12-ounce fish caught in April, 2001, was there to congratulate Dickerson and take some pictures before it was released. After he got his photos back, he started looking a little closer at the bass. It had a mark near it's eye that looked familiar. So he dug out the photos of his 20 3/4-pound fish, which also had been released. They had the same black spot under the eye.

"I absolutely know it was the same fish," said Long. "I never thought she'd be caught again, but I'm sure it's the same bass. The black dot below the eye is unmistakable."

Dickerson's bass was 28 1/4-inches long and had a 26-inch girth. When Long caught the fish, assuming it was indeed the same fish, it was 1 1/2 inches shorter but 1/4 to 1/2-inch bigger in girth.

Dickerson and Long both will tell you there's another bass in Dixon that is around the same size if not bigger than the 21-11, and who knows how much bigger the 21-11 will get in another year or two.

Bart Crabb predicted these events five years ago when he first started telling me that Dixon was "the lake." A lot of anglers are buying in now. On Tuesday, the Dixon Lake rental fleet was sold out before 8 a.m.

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June 6, 2003

Pete Thomas, L.A. Times

Bass May Be Worth Its Weight in Gold

The fight lasted only a minute, but the fallout continues for Jed Dickerson.

The casino management worker from Carlsbad caught what he initially thought was a 16- or 17-pound largemouth bass Saturday. But the scale at Escondido's Dixon Lake "just kept going up and up," he said.

It topped out at 21 pounds 11 ounces, making it the fourth-largest bass ever recorded, nine ounces shy of the all-tackle world record.

Considering that the record was set in 1932, when George Perry pulled from Georgia's Montgomery Lake a 22-pound 4-ounce beast, and that fishermen have been gunning to beat that record ever since, just coming close has turned Dickerson into a star among his passionate circle of peers.

"I can't believe all the attention I've been getting," he said, adding that he has had calls from industry insiders wanting to talk about potential sponsorship offers.

Surely, the name of his lure deserves mention. It was an eight-inch trout-pattern swimbait called a Mission Fish. His gear included a Calcutta 400 reel spooled with 20-pound P-line, attached to a G-Loomis Muskie Light Bucktail rod.

With this equipment, Dickerson, 30, enticed, hooked and landed the third-largest bass in California and the largest in San Diego County. The potential line-class world record is also a Dixon Lake record, replacing the 20-pound 12-ounce bass caught in April 2001 by Poway's Mike Long.

Adding an interesting twist to this story, Long claims it's the same fish, based largely on a distinctive black mark on its cheek.

If so, maybe Long, a renowned bass fanatic, will be the next one to catch it, perhaps at record size, because Dickerson also turned it loose.

As for fanatics, there are plenty at Dixon these days. The 60-acre lake has for years been a lunker hole for serious bass anglers, particularly in early spring when the female bass move into the shallows to stage and spawn, at which time they're at their heaviest and most vulnerable.

For some reason this year, the spawning season has been delayed at Dixon and sight fishing for big bass remains in full swing.

"Normally March is the big time for us, but with all the oscillations in the weather, something has happened to postpone the spawning season," says Adam Stackhouse, operations manager at the lake. "Normally, come April, it's 90 degrees at the lake. We had a warm January, a cold February and half-and-half weather ever since and it's had an effect on the fish."

The fish Dickerson caught had been seen on several occasions, staging near a rock beyond Boat Dock Cove. Dickerson, Mac Weakley and Mike Winn, his friends and fellow lake regulars, had taken turns trying to catch it, to no avail. (Weakley two weeks ago caught a fish that weighed 19 pounds 7 ounces, ranking 13th in the world.)

Finally, when Dickerson returned to the spot alone early Saturday morning, he decided to try to drift over the spot instead of setting up by dropping anchor, which he guessed had been spooking the fish. The breeze worked in his favor. "I got lucky because there was only a slight breeze and it was blowing at an angle that took me right over the hole."

It was on his "fourth or sixth drift" that the fish struck. It charged immediately into the weeds, but with some coaxing it turned and ran for deep water. Dickerson pumped and reeled and soon had the catch of a lifetime in his net, one that measured 28 1/2 inches long and 26 3/4 inches around.

"I was pretty much in shock," the angler said. "I had always wanted to catch a big bass, and I knew this was a big bass, but I didn't realize how big, or the magnitude of what I had done."

Best of the Rest

Ranking between Perry's and Dickerson's bass are two caught at Los Angeles County's Castaic Lake: a 22-pound largemouth by Bob Crupi on March 12, 1991, and a 21-pound 12-ounce fish by Mike Arujo on March 5, 1991.

Rounding out the top five is a 21-pound 3-ounce bass caught by Ray Easley on March 4, 1980 at Ventura County's Lake Casitas.