Adults are urged to take kids fishing. Pat Byle’s story shows why it’s important.
Byle, who in April on Lake Erie won his first Walmart FLW Walleye Tour tournament, grew up on Milwaukee’s north side in a neighborhood he says was “not the nicest area.” Drug and alcohol use was rampant.
But Byle’s grandfather had a cabin on Long Lake in northern Wisconsin. From the time he was 5 years old, Byle and his brother, Fritz, would spend a month there each summer. The time spent outdoors, much of it fishing, helped them make better lifestyle choices than what many of their friends made back home.
By the time he was 16, Byle would ride 25 miles one way to fish for salmon off the pier at Port Washington.
“I’d get up at 6 in the morning, ride there with my friend Dan, spend the whole day fishing and then ride home,” says Byle, who today lives in Colgate, Wis., 25 miles from Milwaukee.
Clearly, his grandpa’s influence was huge and is still appreciated to this day. Onstage in Port Clinton, Ohio, at the final weigh-in of the Lake Erie tournament, Byle said, “This one’s for my grandpa, who passed away when I was a teenager. Had he not taken me fishing, I don’t know where I’d be today. A lot of my old neighborhood friends are gone. We buried one just a couple years ago.”
Getting the tournament bug
One day in the mid-1970s, Byle saw a photo of Forrest L. Wood on the cover of BASS magazine. He became fascinated with Ranger boats and dreamed of one day becoming a bass pro. At age 25 he bought a Bayliner fish-and-ski boat.
But the bass-fishing dream soon died. Byle won a fly-in fishing trip to Canada from a local radio station, so he spent a week catching walleyes on a remote lake in northern Ontario with a friend, Dan Kreger. When he got home, he began reading about the species.
“I found there were so many ways to catch them,” Byle says. “Live-bait rigs, jigs, crankbaits, crawler harnesses. It fascinated me.”
Byle began walleye fishing around home and found he could catch limits on lakes that weren’t considered prime walleye waters. It gave him confidence to take on the Masters Walleye Circuit with Kreger beginning in 1992. The duo did well that first year and placed 13th at the championship. One of their best tournaments landed them fifth place on Pool 4 of the Mississippi River. Their first win was on Bay de Noc in ’95.
In the summer of ’99 Byle heard of a new walleye tournament series promising big bucks that would start the next year. That was the RCL, forerunner to the FLW Walleye Tour. In September 2000 he took two weeks off from work to practice for the tour’s first event on Green Bay. The time was well spent, as Byle placed third in the tournament, just 2 ounces out of second place and less than 2 pounds out of first. He took home $32,000, but was oh-so-close to a check for $300,000.
“I thought to myself, `You know, if I can compete with the best guys from the PWT and the MWC, then I can compete at any level,'” Byle says. “I decided to go after it full force.”
He was encouraged to turn pro by fellow FLW pro Chris Gilman, who at the time was working at Gander Mountain in Brookfield, Wis. Byle would show Gilman photos of the walleyes he caught in local lakes, and according to Byle, Gilman would say, “Pat, you gotta start fishing tournaments.”
At a boat show in 1991, Byle met George Little Jr., Wisconsin’s Ranger representative, who put him on the company pro staff the following year.
Byle looks back at those early years and says, “The biggest difference between tournament fishing then and tournament fishing now is the level of competition. It used to be if you had the latest gear, you had an edge. But the young guys coming up today … it’s far more difficult to get a top-10 than it was five years ago.”
All in the technique
Every pro has a technique at which he excels, usually one he learned as a kid. Grow up fishing reservoirs, and you learn to troll. Grow up on a natural lake, and you learn to live-bait rig. River guys get good at vertical jigging.
Byle’s best technique is open-water trolling with crankbaits and night-crawler harnesses, which he learned on the Great Lakes. Vertical jigging was mastered on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Over time he’s become proficient at all methods of catching walleyes, even seldom-used techniques such as hand-lining, which once helped him save a tough-bite tournament on the Detroit River.
When asked what he’s worst at, Byle says, “Live-bait rigging. It’s not something I did a lot of. I’ve had to get better at that. You have to be good at everything to be consistent, that’s for sure.”
Cabin summers lead to long career
Byle qualified for the Walleye Tour Championship in ’01, ’04,’06, ’07 and ’08. His best finish at a championship was 18th in ’06 on Lake Oahe. His best overall season ranking was sixth in ’04. He’s had seven top-10 tournament finishes over all time, and his FLW Outdoors career earnings total $206,240.
After 37 tries on the FLW Walleye Tour, he won his first tournament April 18 on Lake Erie, a win he says took “a huge monkey off my back.” He hopes it gives him the confidence to stop second-guessing the decisions he makes on the water. He says it took all of his inner strength to stick with his game plan on Erie. He was fifth after day one and first after day two of a three-day, weather-shortened event. He won despite bringing the third-heaviest weight to the scales on day three, the final day.
“What’s so great about this win,” Byle says, “is that, in the past, I wondered if I was doing things wrong and if I was incapable of making good decisions under pressure. Now I’m confident there’s nothing missing. I just need to be patient and keep working my plan.”
Some background on Byle
When he’s not fishing walleye tournaments, Byle works as a sales representative for Pentair Residential Filtration, a manufacturer of water treatment products. He gets five weeks of vacation per year, all of which he uses to fish tournaments. His girlfriend, Teresa Folk, understands his passion for tournament fishing and comes to as many tournaments as she can. His family includes two sisters, one brother and a son. Another sister died of cancer seven years ago. All still live near Milwaukee. His son, Nick George, is 28 and working on a graduate degree in microbiology.
Byle says he’s proud that Nick has a great appreciation for nature, which he got in part, no doubt, while fishing with his father.