The Duckling on the Water: Oliver Ngy’s Bass Story

Oliver Ngy does not fish the way most anglers do, and that is the point. At 41, the California native has built a name as a big-bass specialist by refusing to run anyone else’s program. Toss him into unfamiliar water and he’ll tie on something twice the size of what’s working — a rubber swimbait half as big as the average trout in a stream, or an 8-inch crawler-style duckling meant to draw a snakehead. Those details come from a profile by Joe Cermele for Outdoor Life, who fished with Ngy twice.

Puddingstone Beginnings

Ngy grew up in La Puente, east of Los Angeles, raised by a single mother who worked as a bookkeeper. Money was tight, and he describes having “little to no money” as a kid. Fishing came from boredom more than passion. At 10, he started at Puddingstone Lake, a 250-acre reservoir in nearby San Dimas, using a stick, discarded line, and used pre-snelled hooks he found around the water, according to Ngy.

The hook set for good when a bluegill snapped his sun-baked monofilament. “It was that moment of ‘almost,'” he told Cermele. “From then on, I was fascinated.”

He read and reread the few fishing books at the West Covina Library — most of them fly-fishing titles that taught him to match the hatch. Getting into club tournaments proved harder. “Coming from a single-mother family didn’t really set me up for success there,” Ngy says. Directors turned him away over insurance or simply because no one wanted to take a random kid out.

Right Place, Right Lures

Timing worked in his favor. Castaic Lake and Lake Casitas north of the city were putting Southern California on the map as swimbait pioneers pulled goliath largemouth on huge custom lures through the 1990s. Ngy found his groove just as swimbaits went from an underground scene to mass-produced baits in big-box stores — and as Instagram was taking off.

His break came in 2012. After a month of skunks, he landed a 7.5- and an 11-pounder in a single day, kicking off seven weeks in which he caught 17 bass over 10 pounds, according to Ngy. He filmed all of it, and that footage would carry him further.

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