Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Nov. 29, 2010

Fishing for fun and profit

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On certain weekends, Marty Wilson gets paid for something most of us would be happy to do for free. No, he doesn’t eat pizza and watch college football for a living. He is a professional bass fisherman. When he contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d be interested in letting my readers know about a local angler and his tournament successes, I (forgive me) took the bait. I’ve always loved fishing, and I don’t want to brag or anything, but I have several stories about huge bass I’ve almost caught if it weren’t for rapid fluctuations in barometric pressure and sunspots and things like that. Marty and I could meet, and I could swap fish stories with a pro.

I met Marty on a Saturday morning at the newspaper office, and found him to be an amiable, modest fellow. He said he wanted folks to know that he was fishing in tournaments in the Southeast, proudly representing Cherokee County and his beloved Weiss Lake. Marty’s father moved the family to Cedar Bluff from Adairsville, Georgia in 1982. As Marty put it, “our house was within 500 yards of the Chattooga River, which feeds Weiss Lake. My dad purchased a used bass boat and my whole world changed.” During his senior year in high school, Marty began “fishing weekend tournaments and local bass trails around the state.”

After graduating from Colorado Technical University with a degree in Business, Marty went to work for Honeywell Aerospace, where he still works as a Senior Quality Analyst. From 1997 to 2005 he conducted bass tournaments for Honeywell’s airline customers. The success of these “Customer’s Symposium Bass Tournaments” led Marty to begin a weekend career as a professional bass fisherman in 2007. He says that his wife, Michele, and his two grown children, Shea and Seth, are his biggest cheerleaders.

Had I known there was such a thing as professional fishing when I was a college kid, I would probably have changed my major to Advanced Largemouth Bass, with a minor in Walleye. But aside from watching the occasional fishing show on TV, I still knew very little about professional bass fishing when I talked to Marty. This led, of course, to some questions which probably sounded simple-minded to him. The first was “How big was the largest bass you ever caught?”

The answer was “a little over 10 lbs.” My question was not just one of idle curiosity, though. It gave me an opportunity to tell him about a largemouth bass I caught when I was twelve or thirteen, which would probably have been an 11-pounder if it hadn’t been blind as a bat, and swimming around aimlessly not far from shore. Okay, so actually I didn’t “catch” that bass, as much as I stuck a net in front of it and allowed it to swim into the net. That bass was 22 inches long (or possibly 32, I forget) but only weighed a little over 5 lbs. Marty didn’t seem too impressed with my bass story. He said the fish was probably an elderly fish, swimming around in shallow water, getting ready to die.

When I asked Marty to describe a day in a professional tournament, he told me it depended on who was sponsoring the tournament, and described several professional bass associations with initials like FLW and BFL. As I understand it, there are anglers and then there are co-anglers in BFL (Bass Fishing League) tournaments. Marty explained that before the weekend tournament, each boat owner must find another angler who doesn’t have a boat to be his partner. Let’s say that you and your third cousin Larry decide to be partners. Now here’s the tricky part: Shortly before the tournament, all of the names are put into a hat, or sorted electronically, and each boat owning angler is paired up with a non-boat owning angler who is NOT his cousin Larry.

This means that during the tournament, you are in a boat with somebody you don’t know from Adam’s housecat, and your partner is off somewhere fishing with somebody he doesn’t know. That way anglers in the same boat can keep an eye on each other, to make sure neither of them does something sneaky like loading too many fish into the live well or casually dropping a handful of lead sinkers into the mouth of his latest catch for added weight.

At the end of the day, you weigh your fish (usually a limit of five) and your partner emerges from the fog and weighs his fish, and your combined weights are added together ... at least I think that’s how it works.

Marty uses all of the latest professional bass angling equipment, and his sleek, aerodynamic bass boat is outfitted with a powerful 150 horsepower outboard motor, a 65 lb. thrust trolling motor, and a state-of-the-art GPS fish finder. Marty said that sometimes it can be very frustrating when you use all of that expensive equipment to find a good spot and your opponent in the boat with you catches all the fish. I was going to ask him if he’d ever thrown a co-angler overboard, but I thought better of it. Marty is a true professional, and a true professional would never throw anybody overboard.

Marty has done well in several tournaments. He says that Weiss Lake is his favorite tournament lake. He finished 8th in the March, 2010 Weiss Lake Anglers Trail tournament, and in the May 2010 Weiss Lake tournament he finished 1st. And although he says that Lake Logan Martin is his least favorite tournament lake, last May he finished 3rd in that lake’s FLW BFL Bama Division tournament. These wins provide him with cash prizes to finance his fishing, and also encourage sponsorship from nationally known corporations like Yamaha, Ranger, and Chevy, as well as local businesses like Leesburg Guns and Pro Tackle.

Nowadays, professional bass fishing is a very high-tech, scientific affair. There are electronic gadgets and huge engines and boats specifically designed for “bass.” And there is paperwork involved, including entry information and forms sent to sponsors to prove that you’ve really been fishing and not just fooling around at the office all weekend. So I realized my hopes for swapping fish stories with Marty were foolish. No pro worth his salt would be interested in my Great Northern Pike story, which involved a pike I almost caught which I originally estimated at 15 lbs., but has grown over the years to the size of a Buick Roadmaster. With all of the professional fishing records available, and those pesky co-anglers on board, it would be silly for a pro like Marty to try to top any of my yarns.

And I’m sure he wouldn’t have appreciated my story about hooking my wife in the nose with a gob of worms during an errant cast on the banks of Little River all those years ago. I don’t think pros are allowed to attack their co-anglers with live bait.