Folks you ought to know: Alan 'Guck' McGuckin
He's about bass fishin', country music lyrics, God, family and a lot of heart
TALL CHIEF COVE — He offered a firm handshake with one hand and a chartreuse-and-blue custom “Guck & Sher” Koozie and a baggie of Mama Guck’s peanut butter cookies with the other.
Typical Alan McGuckin; the guy invites me to join him on his boat to take me out for a morning of fishing at Skiatook Lake, and he’s the one who comes bearing gifts.
“LIVE A GREAT STORY” was stamped on the Koozie, a souvenir from the couple’s June 17 lakeside nuptials; clean, bold lettering, in a bold circle, above an intricate map of the lake where a little heart marks the spot where he married Sherrie, his Sher-Bear. She’s the new principal at Skiatook Elementary School.
This Pennsylvania-raised kid, now just a smidge over 50, heard about this little jewel of a lake north of Tulsa before he moved to Oklahoma as a college kid. Remarkably, he got to work the waters as a grad student chasing a Master’s degree in fisheries and zoology from the University of Oklahoma in 1995. What are the odds?
He and Sher-Bear live near the lake, and his folks, now in their 80s, recently moved to town. After all these years apart, he said it’s still weird to drive down the street and see Mama Guck driving down the road.
“Hey! That’s my mom’s car.”
Guck is all bass fishing and country music, and family. Folks love his Facebook posts with photos of friends and local wildlife and a little prose followed by a fitting country music lyric.
He says he has too much energy to sit around and watch a two-hour Hollywood movie. In the summertime, he chases stubborn smallies, hybrids, and sand bass around the lake once or thrice a week if he’s not on the road chasing pro bass anglers.
Bass fishing, country music, storytelling, God, and grins, if I had to sum up Guck in a few words, those would have to cover it.
He was one of the first people I met and came to rely upon to learn my way around the tours 15 years ago. His storytelling and PR work with Dynamic Sponsorships is everywhere. He is one of the dozens behind the scenes who pump the creative juice into the electrified connection that hums between bass fishing fans, the pros, and our favorite brands.
Folks you ought to know
Guck knows everybody in bass fishing, and everybody knows Guck. That’s a bit cliche, but reporters who have to parachute into subject areas and learn on the fly instinctively gravitate to folks of that caliber. There are PR guys, and then there are guideposts like Guck. He’s like a tall rock trail cairn on the wide-open tundra of all things bass fishing—always with a big glowing smile and knowing what’s what.
He always seems to get me talking, too. For some reason, around this guy, I turn into Chatty Cathy. We discussed everything from health and weight loss to crazy dogs eating cicadas and creative writing ideas between the ebbs and flows of sand bass and hybrids surfacing Wednesday.
I told Guck I needed to start columns on “outdoor folks people ought to know.” We agreed that’s one endless and valuable topic, and we agreed the person I thought I should start with is a gem.
It was not until mid-afternoon, as I finally got around to yanking weeds from neglected flowerbeds at home, I chuckled as my mind slipped back to the much-needed morning escape to Skiatook.
“Who lives like this?!” Guck yelled as we doubled up on sand bass, “We do!”
And then, of course, it finally hit me.
“Write about Guck, you idiot.”
So, Guck, you’re the first of my people that people ought to know. You’re a gem, bud.
We have years of meeting behind the scenes at pro bass tourney venues, Bassmaster Classics, and many mutual friends. Then, it just happens that writing about cool people is on my mind, and the chance comes for a morning escape with a guy I could hardly believe I had yet to share a boat with. This was meant to be.
We’ve both been on Kevin VanDam’s boat many times but never on one boat with each other and heck, that guy lives in Michigan!
It was about time we got to spend some time fishing and get to know each other better.
I knew Guck had a long history with former Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation biologist and current BASS National Conservation Director Gene Gilliland at OU. I had no idea he had that master’s degree and helped Gilliland as a student back in the day.
After school, Guck said he cut his teeth in the fishing industry at Lowrance Electronics before cutbacks trimmed the local staff. It was less than two years, but he said it was like an intensive training run that set him on his career path. He says his greatest years were the following 10, as he helped take Terminator Lures from a tiny start-up to a lasting brand ultimately acquired by Rapala.
Since then, it’s been Dynamic Sponsorships and more weekends on the road following the bass trails than he spends at home. There is a less-glamorous and sometimes arduous side to a career that puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with bass fishing legends on a near-daily basis, but that’s the job, and ain’t nobody complainin’.
We finally ended up on a boat together, thanks to Guck’s recent Facebook post with a shot of some hybrids caught at his home lake and a note they’d been surfacing of late. I’ve always wanted to hit fish on a lake like that with a flyrod—especially if I could put a popper to use. I dropped a comment, and Guck said, “Let’s go!”
He said it would be fun to see how the flyrod worked out, and I was excited to hop on board and try it.
Fishing Skiatook’s temperate bass
So there we were at sunrise on Skiatook, one of Mama Guck’s peanut butter cookies melting on my tongue and the lake’s surface concerningly calm.
Guck guessed that maybe a storm that rolled through in the wee hours had the fish on pause for a bit. The breakfast bell rang a little later than usual, but soon the lake surface revealed what Guck talked about—an solid acre of slurping, slapping surface action. Thousands of sand bass and hybrids roiled and then paused like someone flipped a switch on and off and on again.
“We could probably chase schools of fish like this around the lake all day,” Guck said.
I armed myself with two fly rods. I started with a 7-weight Sage with a “Wonder Bread” colored torpedo popper, but the early surface action was slow, and I swapped that big ol’ popper for a size 4 Clouser minnow on a hand-tied 9-foot tapered leader down to 8-pound-test tippet. Also on deck was my 5-weight Orvis, spooled with a 3-inch-per-second sinking line and about 4 feet of 12-pound-test Seagar InvizX fluorocarbon line.
Any sand bass rolling near the surface and within my casting range quickly hit the slow-sinking Clouser just a foot or two below the splash zone.
Lake fly-fishing allows several approaches for bass. True surface fly fishing with a popper is self-explanatory. However, an option I considered later might have been to tie a weightless streamer on a short line to the bend of that big popper rather than switch to a different bait entirely. A popper-dropper rig can be fun if you can cast it without tangles.
Fishing a weighted streamer like a Clouser on a floating line, as I did, sets a depth for the fly according to the length of the leader. The tip of the floating line essentially serves your “bobber.” It sinks as the streamer reaches depth. Or it jerks to the side or under the water when a fish hits!
Some anglers add a “strike indicator” (a bobber) on the line for easier control and visibility.
Other options are full-sink or lines with sinking tips, which have set sink rates. Mine was a 3-inch-per-second full sinking line. Cast it, and let it fall with a twitch or two to keep slack out of the line as you count down the desired depth. Strip it in with an irregular pace to mimic a wounded shad, and —with luck — boom!
I used shad-mimicking streamers on the sinking line, both in size 4; I used a Galloup’s Barely Legal first, but it came up dry. The Whitlock’s Sheep Minnow (also called Deep Shad) slipped down past the sand bass to bring up two hybrids from about 10 feet deep.
Guck hit the water with spinning gear with 8-pound mono and Big Bite Baits 2.8 Pro Swimmers. He out-fished me, of course, and even hooked up on a sweet smallmouth to round out the morning. He said the smallmouths sometimes get finicky when the water warms at Skiatook, so the smallie was a real bonus.
CAST for Kids coming up
Guck is organizing an event where some folks might be able to help him and some of his friends do their best work.
The 2nd annual Lake Skiatook CAST for Kids fishing event for special needs children and their families is set for the Black Dog boat ramp at Skiatook on Sept. 30.
He notes: “If you own a pontoon boat or other spacious fishing vessel and are an experienced angler adept at safely piloting a boat, baiting hooks, and removing caught fish from hooks, your kind and generous heart would be hugely appreciated to serve as either a boat captain or shoreline volunteer.”
Each child gets fishing gear and hats, and goodies. The sign-up is limited to 40 special needs children, who must register before the event and be accompanied by at least one parent or guardian for the morning. It’s free, starts at 8 a.m., and wraps up with a Mac’s BBQ lunch at the pavilion.
Interested families of special needs children can contact Guck at Alan@DynamicSponsorships.com or co-host Sherrie McGuckin at SMcGuckin@SkiatookSchools.org.
Both participants and volunteers must pre-register at the CAST for Kids website at https://castforkids.org/event/lakeskiatook/
Yup, Guck is one of those good folks people ought to know.
I loved the fly fishing Wednesday and enjoyed the conversation—and Mama Guck’s melt-in-your-mouth peanut butter cookies. Guck said she sends those cookies to anglers nationwide, and I have no doubt they look forward to those care packages.
I hope I can re-stock on the boat with Guck again, as maybe we can make those outings a little more regular than once every 15 years.
As usual, enjoyed the article. I'm always happy to see the announcement of your latest subject. Looking forward to the next one Kelly!
Great article Kelly!