By his own count, Mike Long of San Diego County, Calif., has caught hundreds of bass weighing more than 10 pounds, dozens in the teens, 82 over 15 pounds and one weighing more than 20. That last fish was the famous “Dottie,” which weighed 20 pounds, 12 ounces when Long caught her, earning the 10th spot on Bassmaster Magazine’s list of the all-time heaviest bass ever weighed.
Not only was he a big-bass specialist, but Long was a threat to win any tournament he entered in the San Diego area. In an 8 1/2-year period in the early 2000s, Long won more than 35 tournaments and earned about $150,000.
Bassmaster Magazine editors — including the author — featured him on the cover twice, in 2001 and 2009, as did editors of more than 40 other publications around the world.
We called Long “the big-bass guru.” He was almost too good to be true.
In June, an enterprising and tenacious journalist exposed Long as a bass-fishing con man, a tournament cheater who won big-bass bounties and claimed lake records with fish he either caught illegally or “borrowed” from a friend.
The story, “The Dark Secret of ‘America’s Big-Bass Guru‘” — How a catfish poacher lied, cheated, snagged, bribed and bullied his way to become the big bass king of the world,” was written by Kellen Ellis, owner and editor of SDFish.com, a popular website devoted to freshwater and saltwater sportfishing in the San Diego area.
In a long, exhaustive article that quickly went viral in the bass fishing community, Ellis details numerous incidents in which Long used trickery to claim bass records he didn’t deserve. Using testimonies from Long’s former tournament-fishing partners as well as some circumstantial evidence, Ellis builds a case charging Long with using bass he caught previously to win other anglers’ money.
After establishing a reputation as a magician at catching giant bass, Long was able to attract tournament partners who ranked among the best sticks in San Diego County. With them, he won eight team tournaments in a short period. But when he fished alone, as he did 27 times in the same stretch, Long won 15 tournaments.
“He won over 55 percent of the time when fishing alone, and only 25 percent of the time when he was aided by a partner,” Ellis wrote.
Even more condemning, Long’s partners considered him a subpar angler. John Kerr, with whom Long earned six straight Team of the Year titles with WON Bass, said it took him three years of tournament fishing to learn to use a baitcaster. Their first season of fishing together, when they won the first of their team titles, Kerr said Long weighed in exactly one fish.
In March 2005, Kerr and Long weighed in a five-bass limit that set a daily catch record for a fivebass limit, weighing 38.57 pounds, in a WON Bass tournament on Lower Otay Lake. Although Long claimed credit for the catch in a newspaper interview, Kerr later said that Long contributed zero fish to the limit.
Another former partner called Long “the worst I’ve fished with. He couldn’t cast. He couldn’t catch fish.”
So, how did he manage to do so well when fishing solo in those same team tournaments? Ellis is convinced Long was stashing previously caught fish in his boat’s livewell. The expose quotes witnesses as saying Long kept a fish tank containing big bass in his garage. The fish were for stocking a pond, Long explained when confronted with the fact.
One of Long’s partners in a tournament said he happened to turn around and spot Long sticking a hook into a big bass. He pretended not to notice, and shortly afterward, Long “boated” a nearly lifeless bass.
Most telling was when Long called a friend and bragged about catching a 13-pounder one day — most likely on a waterdog, which is illegal to use in California, according to the friend.
Later, after being told that Long had planned to fish a tournament on Lower Otay the next day, the friend instantly grew suspicious that Long would weigh the big bass in the tournament. “I go, you know what, if that happens, I’m 100% sure he’s cheating,” the friend recalled.
Long, fishing by himself, won the tournament with a 26-pound limit — anchored by a 13.2-pound bass, Ellis reports.
Ellis also asserts that Long established lake records in and near San Diego County by submitting bass he had caught by snagging, which is illegal in California, from a different lake.
Although suspicion was mounting in the tightly knit San Diego bass fishing community, no one could prove Long was faking his catches … until Ellis made it his mission to expose the man behind the myth.
The investigation spanned almost a decade and cost Ellis thousands of dollars and untold hours of tracking down leads and speaking with those who knew Long best. After moving to Texas in 2011, Ellis flew back to California three times, hoping to catch Long in the act of snagging big bass.
“I found him fishing 11 days from March 23 to April 12 of this year. I averaged about five hours per day of watching him fish. Some more, some less,” Ellis recounted. “I guess I spent 50 to 60 hours of watching him ‘fish.’
“Four of those days were on Lake Poway, where he was doing nothing but snagging or attempting to snag.”
Ellis developed a network of informants who would tell him when Long showed up at a big-bass factory. He climbed high above the lakes, wearing camo clothing and toting cameras with powerful telephoto lenses.
His patient surveillance work finally paid off with video footage of Long obviously snagging a bass he could see, wearing it out by following it with his trolling motor and deftly netting the giant, exhausted bass. The video plainly shows a large treble hook embedded in the fish’s side, and it captures him unhooking the bass and holding it up for a self-portrait with a camera mounted on his boat.
Why go to all that trouble and expense?
“SDFish.com covers San Diego fishing exclusively. We pride ourselves on the big-bass fisheries, and celebrate the anglers who passionately pursue them,” Ellis explained. “Mike Long made a mockery of it. He took the one thing that we’re really proud of in San Diego and stole it from us.
“A 12-pound bass caught by some weekend warrior on one of the local lakes didn’t mean anything to anyone other than the guy who caught it, and that’s not right. A 12-pounder should mean something, but when Mike Long says he caught a dozen 12-plus-pounders in the last month, how do we celebrate this guy’s legitimate fish?”
Ellis was also angry that Long apparently claimed lake records under false pretenses. As of June 2019, Long still held five lake records in southern California. At two different lakes, Long reportedly applied for lake records with inflated weights of fish caught elsewhere by someone else: his friend Kerr.
“The guy literally faked lake records and set the bar higher than the lakes were capable of producing,” Ellis declared. “He took all of the lake records in San Diego and made them meaningless because the lake officials and the anglers don’t know what to make of them. And he took records from people who deserved to own them.”
What troubles many in the bass fishing world is how we all could be so gullible. We so much wanted Mike Long to be the real deal that we ignored the warning signs.
For example, we should have been skeptical that practically all of Long’s big bass were caught while he was fishing alone. Ellis first became suspicious in 2010 when Long wanted him to produce a video series but wouldn’t let the photographer go along to video the catches. “I’ll call you when I catch a big one and we’ll ‘recreate’ the catch,” Long told Ellis. Ellis declined the offer.
But later, in a series of articles on Bassmaster.com devoted to Long’s big-bass tactics (since taken down), the author noted that for Long, “trophy bass fishing is much like hunting, and that’s best done alone.”
“I’ll tell my family and friends that I’m on a ‘blood trail,’” Long related. “It means I smell blood and I’m going in for the kill — not literally, of course, but that I’m serious and focused and ready. That’s not something I can do when I’m fishing for fun with a friend.”
Fortunately, Ellis felt a responsibility to expose what he was convinced early on was a fraud.
“If I didn’t do this story, Mike Long would still be fooling people,” he said. “The lakes would still be celebrating his fake records. No one else was going to catch him. That’s why I did it. The world deserved to know.”
Originally appeared in Bassmaster Magazine August/September 2019.
