Republished courtesy of Bob Hodge and the Knoxville News Sentinel
Between early February and late May the last place to look for Mike Chase is the headquarters of his restaurant business. You'll have better luck finding him on his boat somewhere between Melton Hill Dam and Kingston Steam Plant.
Chase is a restaurateur who owns Knoxville's Copper Cellar, Chesapeake's and Calhoun's. He is also a hardcore striper fisherman.
Mike Chase, the next Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commissioner from Knoxville, thumbs through a scrapbook in which he has recorded 10 years of striped bass fishing. Photo by Bob Hodge
Now he's Gov. Phil Bredesen's pick to replace George Akans on Tennessee Wildlife Resources Commission.
"I had a friend call me and say, 'I know you love to fish, would you be interested in being on the commission?' " Chase said. "I hadn't really thought about it before, then a couple of weeks ago I get a call from the governor and he asks me to be on the commission. Before that, I hadn't discussed it with anybody or knew much more than there was going to be a vacancy."
Chase's first commission meeting is scheduled March 31 in Nashville. He still must be approved by the legislature - usually a formality - before he is able to cast votes.
"I've talked with George and (former commissioner) Bob Sterchi, and they said you spend the first year or so getting educated," Chase said. "They had a lot of wonderful things to say about the people that work for TWRA, and they said director Gary Myers is as knowledgeable as anyone in any state."
Chase, 58, is a University of Tennessee graduate who left Washington, D.C., for Knoxville and never went back. At UT, he was a history major, but it was his work at Cat's Meow and Carriage House restaurants and a lifelong love of cooking that set him on a career path.
As a teenager, he would come home after a night out with friends and spend a few hours in the kitchen making treats for his family. On March 8, 1975, he and two others opened the Copper Cellar on Cumberland Avenue, and Chase is still in business 30 years and 13 restaurants later.
In Knoxville, he may be best known for barbecue ribs and seafood, but on the Clinch River he's known as a crackerjack striped bass fisherman.
It was a hobby born of a father's grief.
In August of 1995, a miscommunication between Chase and his wife Donna resulted in their 18-month-old son Michael dying of heat stroke after being left alone in a car for three hours. During the next 10 months, Chase not only endured the loss, but also was indicted in Delaware for negligent homicide. In June 1996, after an emotional 11-day trial, he was found not guilty.
Chase nearly was overcome with grief when a friend, Jan Fay, took him striper fishing on the Clinch River near Kingston.
"It was like when I was a kid, striper fishing in Delaware," said Chase, who spent his weekends and summers as a youngster on the Atlantic shore. "The whole thing, the fishing, catching the bait, really interested me."
This Clinch River striped bass was caught on Mike Chase’s first fishing trip with Jan Fay about 10 years ago.
Shortly after that, Fay went out of town on business and told Chase he could borrow his boat.
"He was gone five minutes and I had his boat," Chase said. "I had a hard time catching the bait because I couldn't throw the net. But I loved it."
What Chase was finding on the river between Melton Hill Dam and Kingston Steam Plant was peace of mind. While many of the rivers and lakes around East Tennessee can be bumper-to-bumper boats, that particular stretch of the Clinch is off many anglers' radar.
"When you're out fishing you're out there talking and usually not about business," Chase said. "You talk about everything. I think the camaraderie of fishing is 99 percent of it and catching a fish is a bonus."
There have been plenty of bonus days for Chase.
On the wall of his office is a 40-plus-pound striper that was, at the time, the biggest he had caught. A practitioner of catch-and-release, he has since let stripers go that have weighed in excess of 50 pounds.
But these days, he says it's almost as big a challenge to catch bait - he uses live shad - as it is to catch a striped bass. Over the past three years, Chase has noticed baitfish are not as numerous in many areas as they once were and as their patterns have changed so have those of the stripers.
"When you were young you would go to a bar with your buddies - the bar you went to was where the girls were," Chase said. "If the girls quit going there, you and your buddies quit going there.
"Well, the stripers go where the shad are and for three years the shad have been harder to find: They aren't where they are supposed to be. That's made the stripers harder to find."
Chase is joining a commission that is without a major controversy.
In April, the various hikes in license fees become effective, but those votes were in January. Also in April, the commission will preview the proposed 2005-2006 hunting regulations, but it's unlikely major changes are in the offing.
Issues that could come up this year are a push for a one-buck limit in Unit B and what can be done to improve the state's duck hunting. Neither is expected to be too divisive.
"I'm going into it with an open mind," Chase said. "Whatever the issue is, I'm going to listen and learn as much as I can about it. That's what I feel like I'm there to do."