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Rewriting the Record Books

If San Diego is known for one thing in the sportfishing world, it’s world-class largemouth bass. 11 of the top-25 largest bass of all time were caught in San Diego County. Anglers come from all over the globe for a shot at one of these giant fish. There are 15 lakes in the county which keep lake records, and no angler, prior to 1999, held more than one largemouth bass lake record. It was a really big deal to own one of these lake records.

And then along came Mike Long. Today, Long claims to own four lake records for largemouth bass in San Diego County, along with a couple more from lakes just north of San Diego.

The weights of those record fish range from over 20 pounds at a couple lakes, down to around 14 pounds at several others.

The Cuyamaca Record

Long’s first lake record bass, weighing 14.3 pounds, came on June 6, 1999 at Lake Cuyamaca — a small, shallow-water fishery located in the Cuyamaca Mountains an hour east of San Diego. At 4,620 feet of elevation, Cuyamaca’s climate is much cooler than the rest of San Diego County’s reservoirs, and thus the bass do not grow as large. The previous record stood at only 14.1875-pounds, caught in 1996.

The lake record claim largely came without fanfare or controversy. Though, some anglers quietly wondered if Long had brought it from another lake, noting that he was crouching in a boat in the lake’s parking lot in the photo with the record bass. Normally, the presence of a boat in a fishing photo wouldn’t be cause for concern, but bass anglers rarely utilize their boats at Cuyamaca. The most effective form of targeting the lake’s largemouth bass is from the shore or by wading its shallow waters. At only 110 surface acres, you can fish the entire shoreline of Lake Cuyamaca by foot in one day. And Long, who was at Cuyamaca alone the day he claimed the record, didn’t own a boat in 1999.

“We [Long and he] never, ever, ever took boats up there during the spawn,” Kerr said. “This was during the sight-bite [targeting spawning bass that you can see], you just walk around and see them. All of the sudden, one day, he just shows up with a boat and has the lake record on a sight-bite?”

A 14.3-pound bass is a trophy fish anywhere, but at Dixon or Poway you’d barely get a second look from other anglers with a fish that size. Those lakes kick out several that big or larger each and every year. At Lake Cuyamaca though, just about an hour from each of those reservoirs, it’d be the largest fish ever recorded there in its 120-year history. The historical significance of a big bass is relative to where it was caught.

At the time of Long’s record at Cuyamaca, there was really no reason to question his motives or catches. Not many even knew who he was; he hadn’t yet won a tournament or a BBRC prize.

The Sutherland Record

The first real big public controversy surrounding Mike Long came just eight months later at Lake Sutherland.

Sutherland is located in Ramona, CA about 54 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. It sits more than 2,000 feet above sea level, with stained to dirty water clarity — nearly zero visibility. Like Cuyamaca, Sutherland’s elevation and subsequent climate hinders the growth of bass. The bass population at Sutherland also lacks one other key ingredient needed to become world-class trophies: stocked rainbow trout. With a shorter growing season and lack of protein-rich trout for the bass to feast upon, Lake Sutherland’s standing bass record was only 16.125 pounds.

On March 11, 2000 Mike Long would show up at the dock at Sutherland to turn in a bass which would weigh 16.55 pounds and look unlike anything lake-staff or regulars were accustomed to.

Bryan Englebrick of Ramona was one of those Sutherland regulars, and he was there that day fishing in his boat near the boat dock and launch ramp area. “The water was extremely cold, 54 degrees, and chocolate brown. Mike launched his boat late in the morning, and was out on the lake for an hour-and-a-half before he came back in with the record,” Englebrick said. “The bass was bright green, definitely prespawn. I also fish Lake Poway, that bass was from there.”

Bass typically spawn later in the year at Sutherland due to its elevation and climate. In normal years that would occur in the middle of April and into May, not the second week of March. An egg-laden female isn’t going to be found in water that had only reached 54°F.

According to several witnesses, Long was alone that day, but using someone else’s boat, a white Champion.

Michael MacLean was working at the lake that day and present on the dock when Long came in to weigh the fish. Like Englebrick, MacLean also believes that fish came from a different lake, “it was obviously a clear-water fish. I worked at Sutherland for a lot of years, it’s a dirty lake. I know what they look like. I’ve weighed thousands and thousands of fish. You know when you’re there every day, and that’s all you do, you kind of know what you’re doing.”

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Additionally, Long’s behavior with the fish struck him as odd — almost like Long was trying to conceal the fish.

“When he first brought the fish out of the livewell he said ‘the fish still has a jig in its throat, can you get a pair of pliers?’ I said ‘that fish looks clean, it’s bright, it’s a clear water fish.’ It was obvious. I went to get a pair of needle nose [pliers] and they put it on the scale and weighed it and then it was right back in the livewell. I brought the pliers, and he said ‘no, no, the jig came out’ and took it back out on the lake and said he released it where he caught it. It was just a weird situation,” MacLean said.

Reservoir Keeper Mark Stalcup had the late shift at Lake Sutherland that day, and was also present on the dock alongside MacLean when Long brought the fish in. Stalcup was also a fisheries biologist, holding a bachelor’s degree in fisheries from Humboldt State, and had unique perspective having worked at a number of lakes in San Diego before landing the reservoir keeper position at Sutherland, including clear-water reservoirs like San Vicente.

Stalcup said the first thing he noticed when Long pulled the fish out was its coloration. It was a brightly colored fish, with a bright white belly that looked like the fish he’d seen from San Vicente, but never at Sutherland. Long also didn’t want him to touch the fish, and after weighing it Long took it back out on the lake.

“The whole thing was just kind of hinky. You know, you show up and fish for an hour, you catch a lake record and you leave? And we never saw him again. He didn’t fish up there. Sutherland wasn’t one of the lakes he went to because we didn’t have 15 or 16 pounders … we just didn’t get those kinds of fish up there. I think that’s why we never saw him up there,” Stalcup said.

Diane Dine, the Assistant Reservoir Keeper at Sutherland from 1987–2018, was also present and took issue with the catch. Long arrived at the lake while Dine was nearing the end of her shift, and she recognized him from newspaper and magazine articles.

Dine said the day he claimed the record was the first time that she had seen Mike Long in person, at the lake, or otherwise. “When he showed up that day, he kept looking at the boat dock, I was looking at him and I thought, ‘I think that’s Mike Long, I wasn’t really sure, but that looks like that Mike Long guy,'” she said.

Dine speculated that Long was scanning the boat dock to make sure that Larry Bottroff was not present at the lake that day. “I did say something to Mark [Stalcup] when he came on duty, I said, ‘I think that Mike Long guy is fishing out here,'” Dine said.

She lived at the lake in one of the property’s two homes, and was there when Stalcup called her about the fish. “He called and said, ‘hey, Mike Long just brought in a fish, a lake record fish, but I don’t think it belongs here, it didn’t come from here,'” Dine said. “I went right down, and asked where the fish was and he said that Long took it back out [on the lake].’

“He showed me the picture, I said, ‘that’s a weird picture. It doesn’t look like a Sutherland bass.’ I jumped in the patrol boat and went out and confronted Mike about it, he told me he released the fish.

“That fish was a short, fat, trout-fed bass. Sutherland’s bass are long…they’re thinner, but they’re longer and the color was so off,” Dine said.

She began calling around to clear-water lakes to see if they had seen Long that day. Directly down the 67 about 23 miles is Lake Poway. A tiny, ultra-clear reservoir that stocks trout and had a standing lake record of 17.5 pounds at the time. Her call to staff at Lake Poway confirmed that Long was there earlier that morning, and had caught a large bass.

Dine was adamant that Long didn’t catch that fish at Sutherland, that he brought it from Poway in order to claim the lake record. Poway does not have a private boat launch, only shore fishing and rental boats are allowed. So Long would have had to place the fish in a cooler at Poway, put it in his truck, retrieve a friend’s boat, and proceed up to Sutherland and launch with the fish in the livewell.

“That was the first time I had ever seen him up there. I have regulars that are there every week fishing for bass, and this guy comes up, spends what, 30 minutes out on the lake and has a lake record? What? The way he did it, it was just…it was so wrong,” Dine said.

Kerr confirmed that Long had told him he was at Poway that morning as well, “he said he was fishing Poway in the morning, and just decided on a whim to go up to Sutherland.”

Stalcup also made phone calls to other lakes, including Poway, which confirmed to him that Long was there in the morning on March 11, 2001. “My gut feeling at the time, and still my feeling now, is that it was not a Sutherland fish. At the time, and still today, I have no way of proving that though,” Stalcup said.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a photo of this catch anywhere. The photo was posted in the lake’s boat house initially, but disappeared a short time after and was never replaced.

The Dixon Record (since broken)

Perhaps his only lake record without immediate controversy came on April 27, 2001 when he caught the 20.75-pound bass known as “Dottie” at Dixon.

Of course, we now know that Long was not able to pass the initial polygraph test regarding that catch for the purpose of claiming the $25,000 BBRC prize for the heaviest bass in the country that year. Though initially a catch that was celebrated on all counts, in hindsight, it’s fair to call it into question at this point.

This record was erased just two years later when Jed Dickerson caught the same bass in May of 2003 — weighing 21.68 pounds.

The Poway Record

Long’s next record claim came in Feb. of 2002, one that he admitted to lying about 12 years later. Around that same time John Kerr had caught a 16.25-pound bass at Lake Poway, a giant fish — but short of the lake’s 17.5 top mark by over a pound. Long, who was not fishing with Kerr that day but present while he weighed and photographed the fish, asked if he could take a couple photos with it. Though it was a strange request, Kerr obliged and allowed him to pose with the fish in the rental boat that Kerr had used that day, which was moored to the Poway dock.

Later Long would record an 18-pound 1-ounce bass in the logbook at the lake, used for documenting noteworthy catches. Long later submitted a photo of him holding Kerr’s 16.25-pound bass, claiming it was his 18-1.

Kerr was completely unaware of the claim until several months later, “he told me he caught an 18-1, and I said, ‘oh that’s a nice fish, show me a picture’ and he told me he was still developing the film. So later I finally see it and I recognized it as my fish. My glasses are in the picture, it’s my net, everything. He told me, ‘I thought the same thing too, but we have the same net.’ I talked to the ranger at Poway and he said, ‘Mike just came in and wrote the record down. I didn’t see a picture either.'”

Long claimed that he really did catch a bass that big, but the photos didn’t come out and a writer pressed him to produce a photo so he used that one.

A San Diego Union-Tribune article by Zieralski on Feb. 8, 2002 titled, “Long gets 18-1 bass at Poway for record” included a quote from Long that confirmed there was no witness to the catch. “You have to have a witness to be eligible [for a BBRC prize], and I didn’t have one,” Long said.

With no witnesses, the only proof of his lake record was a photo of a 16-pounder that his friend caught, and his word. His word, of course, is utterly worthless. But at the time, it meant everything.

That’s how ridiculous things were. His reputation as the best big bass angler in the world was entitling him to simply claim lake records without any reasonable evidence to support them. Even as of today, after he admitted to lying about it, Lake Poway still promotes it as their official lake record.

The Jennings Record

On Jan. 29, 2005 he claimed to have caught a 17-pound 2-ounce bass at Lake Jennings to eclipse the previous record set in 1986 of 16.58 pounds. There were no witnesses, no proof other than a photo of a large bass. Other than a few internet rumors at the time from people that claimed they thought he caught it on a closed day, we bought it…hook, line and sinker.

As it turns out, the Lake Jennings lake record is the most preposterous, absurd, and fraudulent of them all. The aforementioned photo of the bass cannot be found online anywhere. Lake Jennings has photos of their lake record catfish and rainbow trout, but not the largemouth bass. Ironically, it was sitting right on my computer’s hard drive. In 2009, Long had given me a folder containing about 40 big bass photos of his for a project we were planning together. While working on this article, I often browsed those photos, paying no attention to the filenames.

But just a few days ago I happened to notice the filename of one of the photos: “Lake Jennings 17-2, 1-29-05.” I thought, “wow, there it is.” But something immediately looked off about the photo — Long was noticeably younger looking in this photo than other photographs from 2005. I began looking through other photos of him and made a startling discovery: the Jennings lake record, claimed to weigh 17-pounds 2-ounces is actually the 16.25-pound bass that John Kerr caught at Lake Poway.

The background and lighting is different, but it’s the same bass, and Long is wearing the same exact outfit as the infamous photos from Poway that he took with Kerr’s fish. Kerr confirmed that they did indeed take photos of the fish on the shoreline of Lake Poway, in addition to those already taken in the rental boat.

As completely unbelievable as it sounds, this is Mike Long we’re talking about. Still, a filename isn’t exactly conclusive proof that this was the photo he used to claim the record. I needed to see this photo published alongside the claim of it being the record.

Page-24 of the April 2005 issue of Bassmaster Magazine, and page-3 of the February 4, 2005 issue of Western Outdoor News, provided that exact proof.

Both publications contained the same photo of Long holding Kerr’s 16.25-pounder at Lake Poway.

This article was published in the February 4, 2005 issue of Western Outdoor News. This article was published in the April 2005 issue of Bassmaster Magazine.

This narcissistic con-man took photos with a bass his friend caught and submitted them as lake records at two different lakes, separated by 3 years, whilst also lying about its weight. Not only is this a testament to the depths he would go to get credit for a lake record, but also destroy his claim of being the angler that he wanted everyone to think he is. Remember, this is a guy that claims to have caught more than 75 bass over 15 pounds. If he had caught even a fraction of fish that big, why wasn’t he at least using one of those fish to fake records?

I’m not really into setting records; it’s just something that kind of happens Mike Long, published in an ESPN.com article titled “California gold: ‘God, let me catch this fish'” on March 16, 2005.