I want to get a lure in as many places as possible.” -Oliver Ngyīut timing is everything. That’s how you unlock codes, get new weapons, find all kinds of things. “If you’re playing Zelda or Mario, you poke every brick. Or the tournament directors would say their insurance wouldn’t allow me to fish.” We didn’t have much money, and nobody wanted to take some random kid fishing. “Coming from a single-mother family didn’t really set me up for success there. “I tried to fish local club tournaments and things like that, but usually I wouldn’t get in,” Ngy says. Ngy simply fished wherever and whenever he could, from charter boats on the coast to local lakes through his teens, when he got serious about bass. Most were focused on fly fishing, though even those taught him the importance of matching the hatch. Ngy remembers spending his formative years reading and re-reading the few fishing books he could find at the West Covina Library. suburbs wouldn’t be much help in fueling a passion for fishing. Courtesy of Oliver NgyĮarly on, it may have seemed like the L.A. He was fishing with his dog and his girlfriend, Riley Kolich, who is also an accomplished angler. “From then on, I was fascinated.” An 11-pounder Ngy caught on a topwater in Texas this spring.
“It was that moment of ‘almost,’” he says. It was when a bluegill snapped that crusty, sunbaked monofilament that he became enamored. It wasn’t catching a fish that flipped his switch, either. And I didn’t do this because I had this passion for fishing. “I was using crappy, used, pre-snelled hooks I’d find lying around. “I literally started fishing with a stick and discarded line I found at the lake,” Ngy says. But he was ultimately saved by Puddingstone Lake, a 250-acre reservoir just east of La Puente in the city of San Dimas. Ngy’s mother worked as a bookkeeper in his California hometown of La Puente and, as he puts it, they had “little to no money.” It would have been very easy, given the situation, for Ngy to fall in with the wrong crowd or follow the wrong path. He fishes in Air Jordans, blasts A Tribe Called Quest, loves to shoot hoops when he’s not on the water, and carries himself with a swagger picked up on the streets of Los Angeles in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At 41, Ngy still maintains his hip-hop style and flair. His reluctance to play by my rules is, at least partially, a product of Nintendo and the streets. Two years earlier, while chasing wild brown trout, Ngy refused to tie on the jerkbait I’d been crushing with for weeks, opting instead for a rubber swimbait half as big as the average trout in the system.īack in the Jersey swamp, as I watched that duckling splat down over and over, I was caught somewhere between wanting to see a giant snakehead obliterate it in the worst way and wanting him to put on a damned normal-size frog and maybe actually catch his first-ever snakehead on my boat. These SoCal largemouths-a total weight of 56 pounds 6 ounces-marked Ngy’s largest five-fish limit. It was a crawler-style bait that waddled and splashed across the surface and, upon touchdown, hit the water like thunder. When I looked up from rigging my own rod, I wasn’t shocked to see that his version of a “little topwater” was an 8-inch duckling. “OK, I guess I’ll just tie on a little topwater,” Ngy replied. “You been getting them on frogs and flukes?” he asked. Snakeheads were the target, and one of the few fish he’d yet to catch. The last time I saw Ngy, we found ourselves on my boat tucked into a piece of South Jersey tidal swamp. Your program is, at best, a starting clue in the mystery he’s forever trying to unravel.
And it’s all because he marches to his own beat and runs his own program no matter where he’s fishing. It’s rare for me to meet a fisherman who bucks the mindset of the average angler so hard it makes me feel as though I’m a novice on the water-despite my having been utterly devoted to, and infatuated with, the sport for more than 30 years.īut no matter how dialed in you think you are, no matter how well you believe you know your home turf, Ngy has a way of making you rethink everything. I’VE FISHED WITH Oliver Ngy on my home waters twice, and I walked away from both trips so inspired I was giddy, yet hopelessly frustrated at the same time. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs.
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