Bodacious Bass and Beyond with Danny Kadota

I took the second bass boat ride of my life in 1994 on a family vacation to Southern California. While I didn’t know much about the sport at the time, it was the heyday of the region’s record bass mania, so I hired a guide at Lake Castaic and made the drive up from Santa Monica for a day of fishing. I’d never seen anything like it before or since – trucks and boats lined up outside the gate, waiting for the rangers to open up, then anglers made a mad dash to launch their boats. “After you park the van, run back and jump in as fast as you can,” my guide commanded. I did as told and we barreled off to an underwater saddle to anchor up and soak crawdads. 

I guess I wasn’t meant to catch the world record. I hooked and landed a single 5-pounder that day, but I nevertheless wanted to commemorate the experience, so when I stopped at the Castaic Mini Mart on the way home I purchased a “Bodacious Bass” t-shirt, not knowing that big bass hunter Danny Kadota was one of the men behind the brand. Years later, after I’d read about some of Kadota’s exploits, I learned that he was tight with my friend and travel mentor Steve Yatomi. 

It all came full circle when one day my phone rang and it was Kadota himself. I took the opportunity to grab my voice recorder and find out more about one of the legends of the sport. Here he is in his own words: 

HPFC: Where did your passion for fishing – and for big fish in particular – come from?
Kadota: I was born in Chicago because my family was relocated back to the Midwest after the war. I remember at 2 years old going out on a boat with one of my uncles and I remember playing with the fish and untying the stringer – that was the last time I fished for quite a while. We moved back to L.A. in 1958 and I started fishing with my grandmother up in the Sierras. I was tying my own hooks at 4 years old, walking the streams and fishing the undercuts. All that together with my bass fishing and my ocean fishing, which became my job after I got out of college, it all came together.

HPFC: And you ended up in the biggest big bass flurry in the history of the world. Looking back 30 years later, did you realize how incredible it was and how short-lived it would be?

Kadota: I did to some extent. We recognized that it was the cross-generation of the northern strain that was here in California, mixed with the Floridas. The early Floridas came in the San Diego lakes, so we would fish down there. We would try to fish tournament-style with artificials but we found out real soon that the Florida strain quickly became much more wary about the baits. I’d go to my northern strain lakes and catch all the fish I’d want on a spinnerbait and crank or a jig, but then when we fished the San Diego lakes and the Castaic and Casitas when the Florida strain were introduced up here, it made a huge difference in our approach. We had to fish lighter lines. I think the biggest thing that we did is we crossed over from saltwater as far as our anchoring techniques, and the other thing is that we had knowledge of currents. That came from reading the stream at a young age to finding out which way the current is going at Cortez Bank a hundred miles offshore. Determining current is the whole key to finding and locating fish. What side of the structure are they going to be on? How are you setting up? That mandated how to anchor precisely off a point so that when you’d put your bait out the current would take it to the right spot. You had to make adjustments by scoping out on one side and pulling up on the other. We had a huge advantage coming from running ocean boats and taking 25 or 30 guys out every day fishing.

HPFC: Other than the currents, what sorts of innovations were going on in terms of big baits, live baits and finesse tactics?
Kadota: The big baits weren’t in play at that time. It wasn’t until Butch (Brown) and a few of the other guys who started using big baits later. The earliest success came on crawdads. Being in the spotlight and very recognizable, I also came from a very strict background. My dad taught us that what was right was right, what was wrong was wrong, and you don’t cross over that line. I fished all of the legal baits that were available. That entailed crawdads, waterdogs and mudsuckers. To keep that array of bait stocked cost an arm and a leg. I had a hundred dozen crawdads at the house at all times. We’d change the water out every night, and I’d cure them, much in the same way that we cure anchovies and sardines in our big tanks offshore. The stronger ones, when you put a hook in them, they hit the water and just take off. My crawdads were all cured. There were some years that there were no crawdads available here in California because of the weather and I’d fly them in from Louisiana. We were hard core.

HPFC: It seems to have paid off. I remember hearing a story about you catching a tournament limit of 65 pounds or something like that.

Kadota: It wasn’t a tournament bag. My friend and I went well over a hundred with ten. We were actually over limit and we said, “Oh my God.” We were both so competitive that we’d catch a fish and throw it in the boat and it was virtually every cast. If we’d had some heavy line it probably would have been even more damage, but we released bigger fish toward the end because we already had our limit. We were around at a time when it was just phenomenal. Even the 20.3 that (Bob) Crupi caught had my hook in it. The reason they knew it was my hook is that nobody else knew how to tie a Miller Knot and my line was camouflaged. Doug Hannon was the one who was instrumental in getting me to camouflage my line. We communicated a lot, but I couldn’t get Doug to come out to the west coast.

HPFC: Why do you think he wouldn’t want to check it out?
Kadota: He was very unfamiliar with deeper water, which I would have thought would have been a challenge. I would have loved to have fished with him in Florida, but the problem was that his peak time of year when those fish were biting was my peak time out west. We’d talk and BS at shows but it was a totally different deal. There’s a lot of stuff I learned from him. Probably the best one was camouflaging the line. I’d put the hook back in my reel and every two inches I’d take a green marker to the clear line and mark it across. So essentially I had about 12 feet of line that was camouflaged. It was crazy. We were beyond hard core.

HPFC: Do you think you ever had the world record fish on?

Kadota: Oh year. I think I dumped it at Casitas. I was fishing with a good friend Corky and it headed right to the boat. The analogy to me, when I saw the thing come up to the surface on its side, I knew how big it was. It started to roll, and when you have a 200 pound tuna it’s kind of the same deal. What do you do? You keep steady tension on it and just hope that the hook does not pull the opposite way. Mine popped, it pulled out right there. To this day I still wonder if I should have free-spooled it and then kicked it back in gear. I did what I’d do in the boat with a big tuna, I just kept tension on it, and sometimes that happens.

HPFC: Did losing that fish haunt you in any way?
Kadota: No. I can see it right now but it didn’t haunt me. There are things that happen. I’ll tell you what haunted and upset me and drove me. It was when I caught my 19.03, on January 8, 1989. Two months before, the first year of Bassin’ Magazine’s big bass world championship. I had entered that. I didn’t even know about it until my friends told me, “You need to enter this thing.” That first week, January 8th, I got that 19.03, and about a week later I got a letter back from the Tulsa postmaster saying they were sorry they had severed my letter and check. They denied me entering that 19-pounder eight days into the contest. You’ve got to remember, I’m being a little facetious here, but Bassin’ Magazine had just launched this year-long contest for the largest bass in the country. At that particular time there were only a few states that had the remotest chance of doing it, California being at the forefront – Florida and Texas. So I pop off that fish eight days into a contest that goes 365 days. Ironically, it was the only piece of mail in my life that got sent back. I can swear on a Bible for you. So I was a little miffed. I hired one of the skippers on my boat to run the boat while I fished all year. On December 15 of 1989 I went out with my Friday fishing partner, one of my high school buddies, and we get out on the first spot and first cast he gets a ten-something. Then he gets an eight-something, fives. I had about a pound and a half fish and a 2-pound fish. About lunchtime we anchored on this spot where I’d got my 18 ¾, we’re having lunch. We’ve just finished our Subway sandwich, I pick up the rod and I lift it and the crawdad starts jumping. I knew there was a bass there – you can tell, they have a panic thump. It eats it, I stick it, and it was a 15-12. That’s the one that won the first Big Bass World Championship. The next stop I go to a place we called the Firebreak and I got a 13. In two casts my day became unbelievable. The best part is that I ended up beating out a guy in Texas for that Big Bass World Championship. I fished 200 and something days that year.

HPFC: Was there a community or was there suspicion among the true giant hunters? I remember hearing stories about them spying on one another.

Kadota: There was mutual respect. Actually I was the one who had the binoculars because I came the sport boats, looking at boats that were miles away. I could read tendencies and I could read a lie from a fisherman. That’s what severed my ties with Bob Crupi. We teamed up to do Bodacious Bass, but it felt like he just wanted my spots. He would sit on a spot all day and he did some things that weren’t the way I would do things.

HPFC: At what point did you give up on the serious bass fishing – or did you give up on it?
Kadota: I did, when I got married. I look at the career I’ve had and I say that God has blessed me so much, but at that point I was 38 years old and I’d been going with my wife for several years. My parents were putting a little pressure on me, too. The year I put in the two hundred and something – well, I take that back, it was closer to 300 days on the water – my parents just jumped on my case. Gail was doing all of my Christmas shopping for me because they were biting in December. I fished 20 days that month. That’s when I got the 15 and the 13. We were hooking a lot of teen fish so I put everything aside and ended up getting chewed out by my parents bigtime. We ended up getting married the next year. When I committed to that, I realized I’d never fish 300 days a year again. I’m happy. I’m blessed. After that I even started to wean off the sportfishing boats. We had three – two sixty fives and one eighty five – at H&M Landing. I went back to my roots in saltwater.

HPFC: You more or less stopped bass fishing in the early 90s. People in the bass world may not know about all of the other fishing you’ve done.

Kadota: Here’s the one that’s going to kill you. So, from the time I was little my parents had to bribe me to do well in school. Fishing was the candy. Every Thursday night my grandfather would call and ask, “How did he do?” My dad would say I did well because I wanted to go fishing. So Friday afternoon grandpa would pick me up at school, we’d go pick up grandma. She worked out in West L.A. She was a seamstress, and she used to do Doris Day’s dresses for her. We’d drive back, Grandma would make the bento – lunch for Saturday – and Grandpa and I would go to the tackle shop. From the time I was five he would buy me Western Outdoor News, and I would read that newspaper. Then Saturday morning at 4 or 5 depending on where we were going, we would get up, get in the car, and we would go fishing. It could be on a pier, or offshore on a boat or a barge, but we fished up and down the coast on Saturdays. Sunday, God had me, I was in church. I had no choice there. All the way through until I got older. Then as I got into high school I would fish more with my buddies. We got into bass fishing, but we stayed diversified. Because of that carrot that they kept dangling over my head for grades I got into UC San Diego – it was closest to the sportfishing landings and had a lot of lakes down there. I got a scholarship and I got a degree in economics and sociology, and when I got out I had two lucrative business offers outside of the fishing industry. I mean, lucrative. The one guy who took one of them retired when he was 35. I turned them down. My dad asked which offer I was going to take and I said, “None of them. I’m going to go work as a deckhand on a boat.” He fell out of the chair laughing. “No, really, what are you going to do?” Really, that was what I was going to do. It was the only thing I could do for the rest of my life and enjoy it. For about a year as I was working on the boats as a deckhand my father continued to ask me when I was going to go and get a real job. Before he knew it I had my captain’s license. The guy I weaned under, I was blessed there, Taka, one of the greatest skippers. George ran our other boat. I would work for him during the week when he was short on crew and he was the first one to have one of these scanning sonars. When I bought the boat from Taka – he’d retired and opened up a tackle shop – we had great crews. That was because we had great mentors. George and I went down to San Diego. We were the northern fleet so we were kind of shunned from the San Diego boats, but the two of us went down there with scanning sonar. Our charters, our groups, we had really good fishermen. You put them on the same schools as all of the boats in San Diego and they’d catch 80 or 90 percent of the fish. They made us look good. It was a two-way street. Between the electronics and the hot groups – and my deckhands were all captains. We had the sharpest crews in the fleet, which elevated it. That started the technical deal down there. I’m just a fisherman and I’m looking for any edge I can. If it’s getting up at 3 in the morning, every morning, to make sure I’m the first one in line, and have a boat that nobody’s going to beat me to a spot on Casitas or Castaic, that’s what it took.

HPFC: So what is your passion now? On social media I can see that you’ve caught arapaima and big halibut. Is there something that still gets you fired up every day?
Kadota: Steve Yatomi tells me that the Papua New Guinea bass tops everything on the list. As long as there’s cannibalism there, I’m not going, because they’ll be eating on me for days [laughs]. I love every aspect of fishing. I get it from my grandmother. My grandparents on both sides left Japan in 1892 because they were Christians and it was very unpopular. My mom’s side stopped in Hilo, Hawaii. My dad’s side came straight into Seattle. My great-grandfather had a fishing fleet in Hilo, and so it kind of trickles down from there, too. He would import koi from Japan and one day my great-grandfather came home and all of these koi were laying out on the lawn like trophy fish and my grandma’s got a hook and line there with a bamboo pole. I got it from her. Even when we used to go to the Sierras to fish for trout, I would go with one of my grandparents. One would fish upstream, the other would fish downstream. If I would go with grandpa, he was very meticulous about his time – he had to be at a certain gas station at a certain time on the way back to L.A. – we were supposed to meet back at the car at 1 o’clock and my grandma wasn’t there. He sent me to find her. I’d go the other way and find her and tell her grandpa was mad. She’d say, “No. They’re biting. We’re not going yet.” I can remember going back in the car and my grandpa wouldn’t talk to her the whole way home, a six hour ride. She was hardcore. I remember she got a 50 pound albacore when she was 85. She lived to 97.

HPFC: If you had to fish for one species the rest of your life, what would you choose?

Kadota: I love the explosiveness of South American fish. I love my tuna. I think I’m getting into another plateau now where I’d rather hook other people like when I was a captain on a boat.

HPFC: You’ve accomplished everything that you set out to do in this industry. Other than introducing people to the sport, what else is on your agenda?

Kadota: I do have a bucket list. I think I want to go to Mongolia or Russia for a taimen. There’s a couple of fish around. I haven’t got a golden dorado yet and that’s something I’d like to do and I’d probably want to take my wife with me. Hopefully we can finish off the bucket list and go out with a smile. 

[Stay tuned for more big news from Kadota and Yatomi in the near future. We’ll report more when the info is fit to be released]