N.Y. Angler Has Recorded Every Catch Since '86

By Rich Bach
Special to BassFan

Roy Bilby unhooks and releases a smallmouth that hit a crankbait against a lock in St. Johnsville, N.Y., on the Mohawk River. He pulls a digital tape recorder from his bass boat’s center console and hits the record button. “Air temperature 54 degrees, conditions cloudy and overcast, water temperature 53 degrees, bass hit a crayfish-patterned crankbait at a depth of approximately 15 feet against the lock wall at 10:45 a.m.”

The attention to detail given to this particular bass, even though it’s the 9,998th bass he’s caught since he began keeping track in 1986, is not the exception. It’s the rule. Bilby meticulously records the exact details behind the catch of every fish that he lands. He records the air and water temperature, prevailing weather conditions, what the bass hit, where, and the size of the fish. When he gets home after each trip he adds to a meticulous log that for all intents and purposes is one of the most detailed descriptions of Upstate New York bass behavior ever kept by a single angler.

I was on board Bilby’s boat for his 30,000th bass, an otherwise unremarkable smallmouth that hit a crankbait on the Mohawk River, and asked him how an angler gets to that number. Bilby is an intelligent, complicated angler and his answers reflect exactly that.

Details are the Difference

“It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when the luck comes. you are ready.”

Those words were uttered by perhaps the most famous fictional fisherman of all time: Santiago, Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist in his classic, Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

If we can attribute the 60-year-old Bilby’s extraordinary success to anything, it's his exactitude in almost everything he does. His boat is meticulously kept, with eight rods tethered to either side of the bow so that they can be quickly unhooked for use – and replaced if the bait they’re rigged with isn’t working.

The Plano boxes of crankbaits, soft plastics, spinnerbaits and topwater plugs that Bilby sifts through as he changes his offering throughout the day only reflect a small percentage of the number of lures he’s got stashed in a carefully kept garage at his home in Richmondville, N.Y. “It’s like a small tackle shop, or so my wife tells me,” he says.

Those eight rods are from a collection of more than 160 that Bilby can deploy on any given trip, although he admits that some have been more or less retired, kept mostly for sentimental reasons.

Bilby’s attention to detail that borders on obsession is evidence that anglers who catch the most fish, or at least catch the most fish consistently, are not simply lucky, but rather are students of the species that they’re targeting. As is the case in almost every other avenue of life, it’s the person who is prepared and educated who ultimately gets the “luckiest.”

An amazing day on the water might be attributed to luck, and even a winning tournament bag could be written off as lucky, but 30,000 bass? That’s evidence of a man who knows exactly how to approach any given day on the water to get the most out of it.

Bilby, the supervising carpenter and locksmith at S.U.N.Y. Cobleskill, once strung together 235 straight trips (he says he fishes roughly 100 days per year) without getting skunked. There are no guarantees, on any given day on the water, that you’ll bring a fish to hand, but when you’re fishing with a guy who once went that many outings without coming up empty, you feel pretty secure.

That first skunking that ended the streak is as demonstrative of Bilby’s character as anything about him.

“I was fishing with a friend and it got to be about midnight, and I said that we had to call it, go in. He didn’t want to … he didn’t want to be the one on the boat when it ended. But I told him (that) if we were just going to keep fishing until we landed a bass, well, anyone can do that.”

An Early Start

“My father got me into fishing at an early age,” Bilby says. “I was 2 or 3 years old, and he always took all the neighborhood kids fishing on Friday nights, putting them in the back of his pickup and taking everyone to a local pond in the late '50s, early '60s. I have a three-picture frame in which I have a picture of myself on my 7th birthday with my first rod and reel – we all shared cane poles before that – a second picture of me at 6 with a small perch, and a third picture of me on the weigh-in stage with Ray Scott at Lake Champlain in 1997 and I’m holding a big largemouth. I wrote on the frame, ‘Bless those who sow the seeds,’ as a tribute to my parents.

“I never became a numbers guy until my 20s. When I started studying bass it became one of the ways to gauge my growth, my progress as an angler. However, it is not the only way. And it certainly is not the most important.”

Like most, Bilby’s first and favorite fish were panfish.

“That’s how my dad introduced me to fishing,” he remembers. “There were local ponds where they bit willingly and it was a great way to introduce a young person to fishing because he could experience success routinely. I still devote a great deal of time to targeting perch, crappie and bluegill specifically, and have developed specific techniques for each species that work extremely well when applied on a seasonal basis.”

The data-equals-success light bulb went on for Bilby while he was watching an episode of Bassmasters in 1984.

“I was watching a show that detailed how Rick Clunn had won a tournament in the fall, fishing way back in the creeks. Before becoming a full-time pro, he was a computer programmer for Exxon Oil Corporation and and he had his own computer that he had inputted results from some 300 tournaments, detailing the patterns for the 1st-, 2nd and 3rd-place finishers. His data revealed that most fall events were won in the backs of creeks, so that’s where he practiced and found the mother lode, winning handily. This was 1984 and no one really had a home computer yet. So, I thought if it could make him a more effective angler, keeping notes could make me better, too.

“So I decided the following year to keep a journal. The first few years it was just notes and details, but by the fourth or fifth year I had pages printed up that I still use to this day. The headings at the top of the page list body of water fished, date fished, time frame, total time fished, moon phase, barometric pressure, and if it rose or fell and by how much, air temperature, water temperature, water clarity, number of bass caught and released, that number added to my running tally, then five lines to detail the prevailing weather conditions.

“The rest of that page, front and back, is used to record all the specific details and catches of that day.”

The most convincing statistic might not be Bilby’s number of fish caught, although that’s undoubtedly impressive. It was those 235 straight days on the water when he wasn’t skunked. Who among us, even the most dedicated of anglers, can boast that we’ve gone even 50 trips without coming up empty? Consistent success, day after day, in a place like Upstate New York where variable weather conditions change drastically at least four times in any given year (and more accurately, about 400), Bilby caught fish trip after trip after trip.

Although careful, detail-filled notes are undeniably part of the reason behind Bilby’s success, an examination of his character, attitude and disposition is even more revealing.

“I tend to be a goal-setter,” Bilby said. “Once I achieve it, I don’t rest on my laurels. I’m already moving on to the next goal that I already had in place. I’m a very driven, motivated individual. As to moderation, if you saw the amount of tackle I have in my basement, you would realize that moderation is not something that enters into my fishing.”

Unbending Resolve

You can’t help but believe, after meeting and fishing with Bilby, that whatever he set his mind to, he would have accomplished with the same rigid, disciplined approach that he’s brought to chasing New York largemouth and smallmouth bass. A guy this driven, this obsessed, doesn’t fail, and if he does, it’s a failure that’s short-lived and learned from, you find yourself realizing. He is a model of consistency and resolve.

Consider that for 13 straight years, Bilby has caught and released at least 1,000 bass. His absolutely genuine excitement for the fish is almost amazing to watch when you remind yourself how often he’s done this.

“When I get down to that last 20 or 30 fish to break 1,000 for a year, every strike is electric and every catch knocks me one more down,” he says. “Every year it’s heart-pounding. It never gets old.”

He doesn’t take a single fish, or the ability to chase them at all, for granted.

“I realize that I’m extremely fortunate to fish as much as I do and it’s something I try to consciously never take for granted,” he says. “I tell everyone that I have the most understanding wife on the planet.”

As I fished with Bilby and contemplated the milestone he was achieving, I couldn’t help but wonder if, after 30,000 bass, a fisherman could ever stop counting.

“I don’t think I could ever stop counting and I really have no desire to,” he said. “I want to see where this goes. It didn’t start out like this. It started as a quest to simply improve and become a better, more efficient and more intelligent angler. I started counting as one of the ways to measure that.”

Not even in his wildest dreams, in those early days, did he see it getting this far.

“It never occurred to me. But I’ve been doing it for 34 years now and if I was to stop, they would all become ‘lost trips.’ I couldn’t do that. Recording everything is automatic, it’s a labor of love. If I didn’t do that, it would drive me nuts until I did.”

At 30,000 bass, I couldn’t help but wonder if fishing, for Bilby, had become a numbers game now, a chase to 30,000 or whatever total he might have in his head that he saw as attainable in his lifetime. But he's still getting up early, prepping the tackle and the lures and heading to the water for the same reasons that almost all of us do.

“I don’t fish just for the numbers,” he said. “I fish to learn more every time I go out. I love the preparation, the anticipation and sharing the experience with some very special people. It’s more about the experience and who I share it with. The numbers just come with the territory.”

When you’ve caught so many bass that you can almost predict where they’ll be and how they’ll feed, does it mean any less when you’re right, I wondered. Are you just expecting those fish to be there?

“I’d say that actually they’re more meaningful when you expect them to be there,” he said. “When I started it was a poke-and-hope proposition. I really didn’t have a clue, even though I thought I did. Now, having studied extensively and invested many, many hours on the water, I am able to approach things with a logical, scientific explanation, using the experience that I’ve gained.

“When experience tells you that a fish should be in a specific location and the best way to catch him is with a specific bait, and you apply that and catch that fish, it is way more meaningful than a poke-and-hope approach, which leaves things entirely to luck.,People say that all the time, 'I’d rather be lucky than good.' I have never understood that. I’d rather be good, period. No one is out there competing in tournaments relying on luck for a career.”

What we learn from Bilby is that when we are “lucky” on the water, we’re doing something right, even if we don’t realize it. By paying careful attention to those lucky trips, we can have more of them.

“Start paying attention to details,” Bilby says. “Take notes of what you did when you got lucky and try to duplicate it.”

It boils down to that careful attention that he applies to almost everything he does.

“Pay attention, more than anything else,” Bilby says. “It amazes me how much some people don’t pay attention. They don’t understand that success can be duplicated.”

And that attention never, he says, stops yielding useful information for the next trip.

“There is something new to learn every time out. No two days are exactly the same. Things change day to day and sometimes hour to hour. I’ve sometimes learned more from days when I struggled (to catch fish) than from days when I loaded the boat. But it is never, ever boring.

"I consider myself a student of the game and the water is my classroom. I really look at it like that.”

Treat the water, and perhaps life, like a never-ending class that can teach you something, and perhaps something profoundly important, every time you enter the arena. That’s what I learned from fishing with Bilby, and that although I felt lucky to be aboard his boat for bass number 30,000, I knew that luck had a little (but very little) to do with it.

Rick Bach is an Upstate New York fisherman who, thanks to Outdoor Life, was able to catch 52 species of fish in 36 of the lower 48 states in a project titled Fish America in 2010. Since then he has put together two projects raising money for melanoma research through fishing, thanks to B.A.S.S., Outdoor Sportsman Group and the Melanoma Research Foundation (https://melanoma.org/event/catch-a-cure/) while working on a master's degree in publishing at Emerson College. He'll target anything, but striped bass are a personal favorite.