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By FRANK SARGEANT | The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 14, 2008

Most of us are lucky to get really good at anything during our lifetime.

Lloyd Bull of Palm Harbor can lay claim to being very, very good in at least two fields. After starting with nothing more than a GI Bill education, Bull built the nation's largest oil distribution company. And along the way, he also made a lasting name for himself in his first passion, fishing.

Bull, 82, holds the all-tackle record for lake trout with a 72-pound, 4-ounce fish taken in Canada's Great Bear Lake in 1995. Most all-tackle records are 95-percent luck, but Bull was specifically fishing for giant trout with a tactic he devised, one that has produced countless lakers more than 30 pounds and about two dozen more than 50 pounds. In fact, he landed nine other record fish on his way to the current International Game Fish Association all-tackle record.

"I first went to Great Bear Lake because I had heard there were giant lake trout there, but the first year I discovered that the boats all trolled the shallows and the catches were typically 10 to 18 pounds. That was nice, but I was hoping for a lot bigger fish," says Bull, who has gone to the lake each summer for the past 41 years.

Unique Tactics Work

On a subsequent trip, he and friends flying to Plummer's Lodge spotted a series of reefs far out in the 160-mile-long lake, which sprawls across Canada's nearly uninhabited Northwest Territories.

"That's where the big fish are going to be," Bull asserted.

He managed to talk the lodge owner and his guides into sending a few boats out to the big reefs, where depths plummeted from as little as 20 feet to more than 100 feet in the icy water.

Bull's tactics include lead-core line and giant Husky Devle spoons more than 5 inches long and 2 inches wide.

"The big fish hang on the edge of the drop-off," Bull says. "We take along a portable depthfinder, and we work back and forth along these reefs, some of which are miles long. A lot of times, the fish hit just as we make a turn and the spoon drops."

Bull removes the factory treble and adds a big 10/0 single hook, with the barb filed away for easy release.

"We release all our fish except a small one now and then to eat," Bull says. "We learned that these lakers are very slow growing due to the cold, and the big ones may approach 100 years old, so we don't want to kill any of those if we can avoid it."

In fact, his record 72-pounder might still be swimming in the depths. Bull kept it alive in a race back to the docks, where he revived it in a net, photographed it and released it.

Still Going Strong

Bull says fishing pressure on the lake is very low. Ice goes out only around mid-July and returns by early September, so the number of anglers who visit each year is limited. All the camps, valuing the fish for their attraction to traveling anglers, have a catch-and-release rule except for a few fish used on the table.

Though Lloyd is well into his senior years, he has no intention of putting an end to the long trips to Great Bear.

"I honestly believe I have hooked and lost several fish that would approach 100 pounds," he says, "and I want to get one of them in while I'm still able."

He and his wife Arlene also continue to fish across the country, with one of his favorite trips a spring visit to the Green River in Utah for trout. He also chases redfish on the flats around the Bay area regularly during winter, and returns to his family home in the Adirondack Mountains of New York during the summers for more stream trout fishing.

"I like that quote that says God does not deduct from your life the days you spend fishing," Bull says. "If that's true, I plan to live forever."

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