When Curt Lytle started fishing professionally in the mid 1990s, he couldn't imagine the gig running longer than a couple of years. He was a young mechanical engineer back then and knew he could always find another job in that field after he'd satisfied his urge to give bass-chasing a try.
Then once he'd been at it roughly twice that long and had a modicum of success,
he figured he could go on fishing forever. It wasn't a bad way to live as long as there was money coming in to pay the bills.
But over time, a lot of things changed. A guy who'd never thought of himself as a "kid person" suddenly found himself wanting to spend every minute possible with his two school-age daughters. Summer Lytle, age 7, and her 5-year-old sister Ember are the two primary reasons that he won't return to the FLW Tour in 2010.
"I didn't see this kind of a change coming, but those two little girls have me wrapped around their little fingers," said the 40-year-old Virginian, who announced his retirement from pro fishing last month. "They're at such a fun age – there are no diapers to change and they want to do everything with dad, whether it's fishing or just walking through the woods.
"The time away from home has taken its toll on me. I'm very glad I made the decision back then to leave a steady job and pursue bass fishing, but now it's time to move on to a different part of my life."
Not the Same Game
Though Lytle's pro career wasn't particularly long, it encompassed a time when the sport underwent a myriad of changes. To him, the biggest evolution has been in the ways anglers go about preparing for a tournament.
"It used to be that we showed up at the lakes with the seasonal patterns in mind," he said. "We might do a little networking with each other in pairs or maybe small groups of four, but everything was about what the fish were doing as it related to the season.
"Then the local information started to come into play more and more every year, and it's almost gotten to the point where the seasonal patterns don't matter. Locals have a key stretch of bank or a key bait color, and that kind of information leads to domination. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, but when I got started it wasn't nearly as prevalent and I didn't change along with it the way I should have."
He liked it better when there wasn't so much communication taking place between competitors and local aces – even if all of it occurred within the prescribed rules.
"I think it waters down the integrity of the sport and I'm sure money is the root cause of it. I just think it was more of a challenge for everybody when we all showed up with basically the same level of knowledge."
He said another thing that's different is there are a lot more "young guns" entering the game who've spent several years with their entire focus on fishing for a living.
"Some of them have a lot more opportunities through family or what have you, and they've simply never had a job other than fishing. I was busy mowing lawns or delivering pizzas and I didn't have all that time that some of the young guys have now. I don't mean that as a dig at those guys, but it's something that's become a lot more common over the last 5 or 6 years."
Plans to Stay Busy
Lytle will leave the tournament scene behind, but he's not going to stop fishing. He has a 2 1/2-acre pond on his 157-acre property that's teeming with bass, bluegill and minnows, and he wants to introduce as many of his daughters' friends and schoolmates to the sport as possible.
His place is in close proximity to the gigantic Norfolk Naval Base, and he plans to bring kids out who have a parent stationed overseas. Then there are children like those found in every community, many from broken homes, who don't have a lot of opportunities to partake in outdoor recreational pursuits.
Lytle said the amount of local information that some anglers receive is the biggest change from when he first started fishing professionally.
He also wants to go after some species he hasn't fished for in years, everything from tuna to trout. And he plans to work full-time, or close to it, in the engineering field.
"I don't want to travel, though," he said. "I want to be home with my family."
He harkened back to his early years on the FLW Tour, when he was mentored by an angler named Mike Watson from Tennessee. Watson was a regular on the circuit during the first 4 years of its existence, but quit after the 1999 campaign.
"He was phenomenally gifted at flipping, but he quit when his little girl got to be about 4 years old. He just couldn't stand being away from her anymore. He'd been leaving in the middle of the night because there was no way he could go while she was awake.
"Despite the fact I saw him do exactly what I'm doing 10 years ago, I still didn't see it coming. But it's the right time. Now I can go out in my back yard and catch 10 pounds in 10 minutes instead of driving somewhere and battling the elements and racing all over a pressured lake and not catching 10 pounds all day."
Notable
> Lytle said a young girl who visited his property recently caught her first bass and her first bluegill – on the same cast. "It happened because she didn't reel the bluegill in quite fast enough," he said.
> He wouldn't discourage any aspiring young angler from giving pro fishing a try. "If you can put together a plan, then go out and give it a shot. But you need to be able to recognize if it's not working, or like in my case, if you just don't want to do it anymore."
> He was the 5th-place finisher in the 2003 Bassmaster Classic at the Louisiana Delta. His best FLW Tour finish was a 2nd at Okeechobee in 1999 and he won Central Stren events at Beaver in '99 and 2000. He also won the 2000 Missouri Bassmaster Invitational at Lake of the Ozarks.
