A Caste System for Fishermen : The lines are drawn between elitist fly fanciers and bait anglers who’d rather keep their catch

Many anglers who pursue the wily trout use as bait such things as orange marshmallows, red-dyed salmon eggs and pink garlic cheese. They are looked upon with disgust and disdain by anglers who consider themselves the elite and sophisticated trout fishermen. These folk fish for trout using hooks covered with hair.

For the non-angler, of course, this battle between bait fishermen and fly fishermen is about as stimulating and provocative as a six-hour “My Mother the Car” TV marathon. But as thousands of Valley anglers prepared this week for the annual pilgrimage to the Eastern Sierra for Saturday’s opening of the trout season, one only had to visit fishing tackle shops to know that a battle does indeed rage.

Let’s take a look at the combatants.

In one corner are bait advocates, the blue-collar trout fishermen. Beginning last weekend, these anglers converged on tackle shops in great numbers, jockeying for position up and down aisles stocked with jars of tiny, colored marshmallows, colored salmon eggs and cheese of many colors and flavors.

These baits will be the Last Supper for most of the estimated 100,000 Eastern Sierra trout caught this weekend. There are many opinions on why a healthy, supposedly wary trout gleefully will inhale a flaming red glob of puttylike, garlic-flavored cheese. But the important thing to these fishermen is not why trout eat cheese balls or marshmallows but simply that they do.

“They work, that’s all,” said Northridge angler Brian Dante as he kicked gently at a shelf of purple floating marshmallows at Turner’s Sporting Goods in Reseda. “What can you say? At some point most people cut out all the naturalist stuff and decide that if they’ve driven that far, they want to catch some trout. And this stuff catches trout.”

Dante’s fishing partner, Steve Friedman of Glendale, said the fly fishing bit is very nice. Right up until he gets hungry. Then, it’s Cheese Ball Time.

“Last year we tried flies and tiny artificial lures all morning,” Friedman said. “We caught nothing. Then we went to garlic marshmallows and cleaned up. When it gets right down to it, you have to catch some fish, right?”

Perhaps tops on the list of baits are salmon eggs. Or reasonable facsimiles of salmon eggs. They come in jars of about 75 with names like Uncle Josh, Pautzke’s Balls o’ Fire, Atlas “Original” Oil Pack Eggs and Wild River Cheese Salmon Eggs. A new one on the market is Dr. Juice. It features a picture on the label of a man with a beard and glasses and a safari hat. This, one presumes, is Dr. Juice.

The salmon eggs used for trout bait come in many colors. Bright red. Orange. Flesh-colored.

They don’t come in pink.

“A natural salmon egg is pink,” said Mike Haynie, the manager of the Fillmore Trout Hatchery.

Bait eggs are treated with preservatives and dyes and other chemicals.

Orlando Pereria of Turner’s said his store has sold more than 500 jars of salmon eggs in less than a week. That’s about 38,000 eggs.

Second in popularity to salmon eggs is a substance called Zeke’s Natural Floatin’ Bait. (Fishermen like apostrophes. It makes them want to go fishin’.) Zeke’s, a substance similar in texture to window putty, comes in five flavors: garlic, original, corn, cheese and marshmallow.

Pereria said his Reseda store has sold 400 jars of floatin’ bait in the past six days. A precise flavor breakdown was not available.

Last on the list are marshmallows. About the size of a fingernail, they come in white, pink, red or orange, and in cheese or anise flavor.

The method of using all of these baits is to put a gob of it on a hook and put a weight about 12 inches from the hook. The weight rests on the bottom, the bait floats slightly above the bottom, and the angler also gets to rest on his bottom as he waits for a the trout to locate the offering.

Don Falsken of Westlake Village headed for June Lake this week after stocking up on salmon eggs and floatin’ bait.

“I don’t know why it works, but it does,” he said. “It floats off the bottom and trout can see it. I guess that’s why they eat it.”

Using this they-eat-it-because-they-can-see-it theory, can the use of tiny orange freeway cones as bait be far off?

When the trout do eat this type of bait, they die. The bait doesn’t kill them, but the hook usually is swallowed by the trout. These trout are headed for the frying pan.

In the other corner of this angling battle are the fly fishermen. This hairy-hook set believe that anyone who would catch a beautiful rainbow trout on a marshmallow also would hunt deer from a helicopter with antler-seeking missiles.

Fly fishermen tend to wear expensive Irish wool hats and spend more money for their angling gear than the average bait fisherman would spend for a house.

In the Valley, one of the premier fly fishing shops is the Fishermen’s Spot in Van Nuys, where anglers can spend as much as $350 for a limber graphite fly rod that can cast the nearly weightless fly and $150 for a reel. Flies cost a dollar or more each. Serious fly fishermen also own a pair of waders that keep them dry as they stand in streams and rivers, and expensive fishing vests hold their flies and other tackle.

“Experienced fly fishermen carry 100 or more flies,” Fishermen’s Spot co-owner Jeff Ellis said. “It’s not unusual for a guy to own 300 flies. On the average, four to 10 dozen is about what you need.”

Ten dozen flies translates into roughly $150 worth of tiny hooks covered with the hair from deer or squirrel or the feathers from pheasant, grouse, peacock and dozens of other birds. The flies are imitations of, well, flies. Bugs. Bugs that float and bugs that don’t. And other flies called streamer flies imitate tiny fish, from minnows to tiny rainbow trout, which large trout eat.

And, if an angler does somehow persuade a trout to eat a hook covered with hair from a deer’s neck, he generally pats it on its slimy head and releases it back into the stream.

“Last year I put back an eight-pound brown trout in the Owens River,” said dedicated fly fisherman Rich Ramirez of Woodland Hills. “He was 27 inches long. I thought for a second about keeping him, but I know where he lives. I can find him again.”

For the average bait fisherman, releasing an 8-pound trout--an average Eastern Sierra trout weighs less than one pound--is unimaginable. If a 27-inch trout is caught on a pink marshmallow, you can bet that the angler who caught him also would know where he could find him again--in his refrigerator, wrapped in aluminum foil.

Ramirez calls bait fishermen “worm drowners.” He said that there’s a place in the outdoors for them, just as long as they’re not in his place.

“Those people buy a lot of fishing licenses,” he said, “and that money is used to provide all of us with quality fishing. I know people who follow the hatchery trucks, catching trout with eggs right after they dump them into the lake. That’s OK, I guess. It’s just not for me.”

Bait fishermen view fly fishermen as snobbish. They would rather sit through an eight-hour Caltech lecture titled Twelve Practical Uses For Zinc than be forced to fish beside them for any length of time.

“In recent years a lot of streams have been set aside for fly fishing only,” Ellis said. “This really gets the bait fishermen mad.

“But the fly fisherman generally doesn’t care what the bait fishermen think. They wish they’d all just stay home.”

In response to that, most bait fishermen would offer the fly fishermen this wish: May the hook of a green caddis larva imitation lodge itself in your earlobe.