text and photo by Gord Pyzer Professional Advice Three top anglers share their trade secrets for getting paid to fish Can you really fish for a living? I get asked that question regularly these days, usually by keen, bright-eyed teenagers who’ve grown up on a steady diet of television fishing shows. But they’re not alone. Plenty of adults also dream, and ask, about turning pro. With that in mind, I recently sat down with three of the world’s top tournament anglers—Kevin VanDam, Gary Parsons and Tim Horton—to get their thoughts and advice on breaking into pro fishing. Know how: Tim Horton believes aspiring pros need to be good at most techniques      The consensus is that if you’re good enough and work hard enough on your marketing skills, you can make a go of it. But don’t be in a rush to quit your day job, or stop investing in a future career off the water.      “I broke in when the industry was starving for new blood,” recalls Kevin VanDam, who captured B.A.S.S. Angler of the Year honours as a rookie in 1992—an astounding feat. He’s since won seven B.A.S.S. events and made it to the BASSMASTER Classic 11 times, winning it in 2001. “But today there is less sponsorship money available and every year the competition gets tougher.”      Gary Parsons, who sits atop the pro walleye world these days and is the only angler to ever win tournaments on the three major U.S. circuits, echoes VanDam’s thoughts on the challenges facing anyone considering a pro fishing career. “Expenses and equipment are huge hurdles you have to overcome at the beginning,” Parsons says. “No one is going to hand you the keys to a $60,000 boat, motor and trailer that you’re going to wear out in a year. In today’s competitive world you have to do consistently well, winning tournaments for four or five years before you can line up meaningful sponsors.”      “I was in that boat not long ago,” says Tim Horton, chuckling. In 1998, at age 25, Horton won the Maryland B.A.S.S. Top 150 and two years later he was B.A.S.S. Angler of the Year. “Tournament fishing was all I wanted to do,” he says, “but I realized there are only about 50 people in North America who make a decent living at it. So I knew I needed a fallback position. I went to college and earned a degree.”      Both Parsons and VanDam agree that backup career training is a great idea. Parsons, for example, funded his early tournament years working as a dentist. And before he turned pro full-time he took courses in marketing, something that VanDam highly recommends. “Being a professional angler is much more about your abilities to market yourself, and your sponsors’ products, than it is about catching fish,” says VanDam. “Catching fish is important, but I know several successful pros who have never won a major event.”      The real work, say the pros, begins once you decide for sure to make big-league fishing a career. “You have to be focused on fishing,” says Horton. “You have to be versatile—not necessarily the best at every fishing technique, but you’d better be good at most of them.” HOME WATERS Obviously, to be a pro you’ve got to be a great angler. But Tim Horton, Gary Parsons and Kevin VanDam—three of the world’s top tournament anglers—all agree you have to be much more than the “hot stick” on your local waters. You also have to be a quick study when you fish competitively in new places where the locals know the lake as well as you know your own home waters. How important is that? Consider: many pros will actually uproot their families and move just to be closer to a lake they want to master. Now that’s dedication.      And you’d better be prepared to survive the pressure. The stress can be unbearable, says Parsons, when you suddenly realize you have to win some money in the next tournament in order to pay the bills. “I know a lot of very good anglers, but very few good tournament anglers,” he says. “Most crumble under the stress.”      Despite the inherent challenges of going pro, Horton, Parsons and VanDam all agree that if you go into it with your eyes open, and with a solid education or occupation to fall back on, you should just follow your dreams and go for it—whether you’re a bright-eyed teenager or not.