Billy Davis (Melton Hill Bill): Reservoir Bass and Musky Tactics

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 522, featuring Billy Davis...

Captain Billy Davis, known online as Melton Hill Bill, guides for striped bass and muskie on East Tennessee's highland reservoirs. In this conversation he explains how he built a 300-day-a-year guiding business around skipjack herring, live-scope technology, and a deep understanding of landlocked striper behavior.

Meet Melton Hill Bill

Tom Rowland: What's going on, everybody? We've got an awesome guest for you today. I know you hear me say that every week, but I do seek out people that I really think you're going to enjoy, and one of the people I've fished with in the last few years that I really, really enjoyed fishing with, and I fished with this guy more than once, he's not a saltwater guy, he's a freshwater guy. Melton Hill Bill. Melton Hill is a reservoir in Tennessee, and Bill is Captain Billy Davis. Captain Billy Davis is spending over three hundred days a year chasing striped bass in Tennessee reservoirs like Melton Hill, and he's as good as they get. He first became known, or first got noticed, doing one of Larry Dahlberg's shows. You might remember The Hunt for Big Fish. It was one of the best shows on TV, and Larry Dahlberg is certainly one of the best anglers on TV and an awesome television host. He launched the career of Captain Billy Davis, and since then he's never looked back. He had some interesting times deciding he was going to quit his job and become a fishing guide, and it's obviously been a very good choice for him, because he's catching tons of these big striped bass. He also catches muskie, and he's got some great stories and is just an overall super cool guy to spend the day with. If you want to check him out, go to meltonhillbill.com. That's his website. You can go there and see what he does, and if that's something you're thinking about doing, book early, because he is booked all the time. The guy is fishing every single day, and he knows a few things. So we're going to find out what he knows and his story right now with Melton Hill Bill. Billy Davis, how are you, man?

Billy Davis: I'm doing good.

Tom Rowland: Man, doing good. I'm glad to have you on here. You've been on the list for a long time — I've been wanting to have you on the podcast. Man, you're a hardworking fishing guide.

Billy Davis: Yeah, I go as much as I can. It's around that.

Tom Rowland: I have heard that you fish as much as three hundred days a year. Is that right? At least?

Billy Davis: Yes, sir. At least. We have year-round fishing here. You've been with me out to these steam plants, so you can get out there in the dead of winter and the water can be sixty to seventy degrees, and those fish don't know it's January.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. There aren't that many places you can fish three hundred days a year. Certainly can in the Keys. I think maybe there are some Louisiana guys getting three hundred days a year. Where else do you think you could do it?

Billy Davis: Well, shoot, I would think anywhere that's got a variety of man-made influences. You know, these dams — we have a series of dams, and the water that comes out of them is rarely, if ever, colder than fifty degrees. So you can always have fifty-degree water. I think in Arkansas you'd probably have some situations like that, some deeper dams. I think those man-made influences really help establish my fishery here.

Tom Rowland: For sure. Three hundred days was always a big benchmark for me. If you could get to three hundred days, there were a couple of things going on: first, you're in a fishery that can support it, and second, you've got something that's such a draw that people keep coming. The fishing has to be good enough, and you have to be providing a level of service that's good enough — but it's not just that three hundred people want to go fishing, because a lot of them want to fish on the same days. So really, to book three hundred days, you have to have far more clients than that. It's a testament to any guide who can fish three hundred days, and a testament to where they're fishing. Let's talk about what you do. In the course of three hundred days, are you fishing mostly for stripers, or other species too?

Three Hundred Days, Mostly for Stripers

Billy Davis: I fish probably ninety percent of the time for striped bass, because we can catch them any day of the year. These fish are cold-water fish — they prefer temperatures fifty to seventy degrees, so you can catch them any time of the year. I do chase muskie every now and then. I kind of do that in the wintertime, just because it's so physically demanding fishing for muskie in the dead of summer. It's very difficult to do.

Tom Rowland: Well, let's talk about the muskie a little bit. That's a fish I've fished for. I fished for them with you, unsuccessfully — we didn't get one — and I've fished for them a couple other places. They're called the fish of ten thousand casts. That's what I always heard growing up. I always kind of wondered, for somebody who really knows muskie, is that right, or is it a legend?

Billy Davis: What I'd say is it's ten thousand casts if you don't really have an idea about muskie.

Tom Rowland: See, that's what I was thinking — it's got to be easier to catch than that for somebody who's really got it worked out. Tell me about the muskie.

Chasing Muskie on Melton Hill

Billy Davis: So they started stocking muskie here in 1998. They were originally native to Tennessee — I think when they built the dams it hurt their ecosystem and they quit reproducing, so they started stocking in '98.

Tom Rowland: Wait — is the muskie a native fish to Tennessee?

Billy Davis: It is. It's native to all the rivers here, so part of the stocking effort was to bring back some of that native strain and put them in reservoirs where they'd thrive. Melton Hill was the main reservoir they chose to stock a lot of them in, and I got lucky and grew up at the right time. I graduated college and started fishing pretty hot and heavy, and it turns out this lake is loaded with muskie. I was able to fish around the Bull Run Steam Plant in the wintertime and do really well. We got a lot of practice with muskie — follows were the big term, and we'd have thirty or forty follows in a day.

Tom Rowland: And what keeps them from biting? You're getting forty follows but you can't close the deal — what's the problem?

Billy Davis: That's pressured fish, and we didn't know what we were doing with the figure-eight and were very limited on musky tackle. There were no musky shops, you couldn't order much online, so we tried different things and stumbled across a couple of bucktail lures that would really entice them. But if that's all you had, those muskie do wise up and you'll get a lot of follows without commitment. As the internet grew, in the early two thousands, we were able to start ordering a lot of baits online, and we figured a lot of things out, had a lot of practice, and had a lot of fun.

Tom Rowland: A lot of the muskie fishing I've seen, and some I did on a lake in Kentucky — we were fishing with the heaviest tackle. I could have caught a marlin with this tackle. It was so heavy, it was the heaviest rod I had, spooled up with a hundred-and-twenty-pound braid, and I thought this has to be overkill, this isn't even fun to throw. What's your opinion on that heavy tackle?

Billy Davis: I fish a lot of fallen timber. I'll pull my boat within thirty or forty feet of a fallen tree, and I know there's a muskie sitting in there. So you have to be able to pull that muskie away from the tree, because he's going to come up, grab your lure, and go right back into it — you have to stop that fish. It takes these nine-foot rods, these super-heavy broomstick rods with a hundred-pound line. Also, that muskie will come up and do the figure-eight maneuver right at the boat, and if you're throwing some of these double-bladed baits to keep your bait swimming, you have to have a real heavy rod. And when the muskie comes up and grabs it, you've got to set that hook, because a lot of times they'll come up, grab it, and just sit there, and you'll get that hook set and they'll spit it right back out. It just takes a pretty beefy rod to drive those hooks home.

Tom Rowland: I got it. So what are they eating regularly — what's their diet?

Billy Davis: I'd think muskie are going to eat whatever they can. Gizzard shad — if you're roaming open water and you follow the bait and the gizzard shad, you'll more than likely run into some muskie. I know they eat crappie, they eat anything. They'll sit in these fallen trees a lot of times and just ambush — muskie are shaped like a log. When I started getting hot and heavy into it, I bought an Aqua-Vu camera and would drop it down on these trees, and you could see the muskie sitting right up under there. They'd just ambush, sit still, and that's how I knew how to present the baits — you wouldn't necessarily throw right up into the tree, you'd throw past it and pull it by, and that muskie would shoot out. It was very neat to get that stuff out and use some of that technology. We didn't quite have the down imaging, and it's hard to see a muskie on two-D sonar, but when you started using the Aqua-Vu camera you could figure out these things are laying right here, and if you make this cast you should get it to come out. We figured a lot of that stuff out, so it was a lot of fun.

Tom Rowland: That's cool. And the muskie fishing is obviously really good — why is it you're spending ninety percent of your time chasing the striped bass?

Billy Davis: Because I can go out and catch muskie, and my buddies can go out and catch muskie with me, but no offense, a lot of the guys I'd take — and I'm sure you ran into this too — can't make that cast. I knew how long I could throw to a treetop, count two-and-a-half seconds, and pull my bait out, but if you can't hit an area the size of a hula hoop from fifty feet down, it's like tarpon on a fly — you missed the shot, you missed the shot. And with muskie, it was too stressful for me as a fishing guide. We'd make all these casts, do all this effort, the guys get lazy, they're not all in the best shape, they can't physically do it, and then here comes this muskie, they finally get it to follow in, and they don't do the figure-eight maneuver, or they pull the lure out of the water.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, so then it's kind of like these people would like the stripers just as much as the muskie, and you're going to be able to get that done.

Billy Davis: I started taking those same guys — they'd spend twenty minutes saying, we can't do this, and I'd say, well, let's go catch some skipjacks and float them for stripers. And every one of them would say, this is awesome, this is so much more fun — it's a lot less demanding.

The Pull of Live-Bait Striper Fishing

Tom Rowland: Well, not to take anything away from either type of fishing, but the striper fishing I've done with you is fantastic.

Billy Davis: And it's the closest thing we have to going out on the coast.

Tom Rowland: I know — you're really fishing mostly with live bait. I love fishing with live bait because it's very similar to a lot of saltwater situations we find ourselves in, and you're fishing for a true trophy fish — you could catch a fish twenty, thirty, forty, fifty pounds with you. That's a good fishery, and you really have it down. And that's what goes back to being able to book three hundred days a year — you have to have something that's such a draw, because it's not three hundred individual people, there's thousands who want to fish with you. So to keep booking like that, you're doing a whole lot of things right. If you go to your website, Melton Hill Bill, I suggest you should — it's pretty cool, there are pictures from all the different years of stripers, so it's not like a fluke, you can go back years and see the kind of fish you're producing. So what is it about the striper that captivated you? Everybody's got a story about their first one, or what it is about that fish they find so interesting.

Growing Up Around the Steam Plant

Billy Davis: Well, I grew up around the Bull Run Steam Plant on Melton Hill Lake, and it had produced several state-record-sized fish. At one time it held the world record at fifty-five pounds, and it went back and forth with a lake in Middle Tennessee called Cordell Hull. Sixty-five is now the state record, but at one time Melton Hill held the state-record sixty-three-pound striper. I grew up hearing about all this, and I'd fish around the Bull Run Steam Plant, and it just captivated me. I went there and saw how the guys fished for them, and it kind of lit a fire under me. I tried several different methods to get them, but I came to find out live bait is the easiest. I'd gotten into a little white bass fishing too — I'll give you the short story. We'd fish several lakes around town, catching little white bass on Zara Spooks and Zara Puppies, real little two-to-three-pound white bass, and I snuck out to Melton Hill one day, still in college, and noticed some bait balls kind of getting worked. I started throwing the little Zara Puppy, and I don't know — could have been a thirty-five-pounder just came up and inhaled that Zara Puppy and spooked me. And I'm like, ah, so this is what it's all about. That was probably the first time I ever felt the true power of a striper, on twelve-pound test, thrown on a topwater lure, and I thought, this is what I was meant to do. So I quit everything else and decided I wasn't going to bass fish — I was going to chase stripers.

Tom Rowland: And how did that translate into guiding for them?

From Muskie Club to Muskie Guide

Billy Davis: I actually started out as a muskie fishing guide. There were so many other striper guides around that I wanted to do something different. Back in '98 they started stocking these muskie, and 2003 is when we really started targeting them. I noticed there was a local muskie club that met at the Gander Mountain, and I joined it — I was one of the younger guys, compared to a lot of older guys who were from up north and had muskie-fished their whole lives. They ran this club, and I was this young twenty-three-year-old who mentioned the idea that we needed a website — this was 2004, 2005, when discussion forums were starting to take off. The old-timers didn't want to do a website, so I said, I'll build my own, and I started tnmuskies.org. We had a group chat and started sharing photos — it was all kind of new technology — and guys up north would ask who the local muskie guy was down there, and if there wasn't one, I'd say I'll do it. So I started taking these guys muskie fishing out of a sixteen-foot jet boat, just a small little boat, and it was on — we did good. I'd mainly take guys who already knew how to muskie fish, because this was all brand new to them seeing our water. We did pretty well fishing fallen trees, caught a lot of muskie up to fifty-four inches, and had good times.

Tom Rowland: And did you just start your guiding career from being a muskie guide?

Billy Davis: I just did muskie only for probably three to four years, and as word grew, more and more people started to come. I was just doing this part-time, on weekends and after work.

Tom Rowland: What was the work?

Billy Davis: I was an environmental geologist.

Tom Rowland: And is that what you studied in college?

Billy Davis: Yeah, I was a geology major. My ultimate plan was to work with my uncle down in Louisiana — he's a petroleum geologist down there and makes the big bucks, and I thought that's what I wanted to do. I was gung-ho on getting my degree, going down there to fish and work as a geologist, until my junior year, when I had a son. That put a wrinkle in things, because his mama wasn't going to move to Louisiana, and I wanted to stay here. So I found a job in the environmental field, totally different from what I wanted to do. I worked out in Oak Ridge at an environmental consulting business, and I drove by that Bull Run Steam Plant every single day. There's a road that goes right by it, and some days I'd be sitting on the bridge looking down at the steam plant, seeing the stripers go nuts. I was drawn to that area, and it made it very difficult to go to work. So I'd do my job, get off work early, and I bought a little sixteen-foot boat that I'd pull to work with me, and as soon as I got off, I'd rush to the water.

Tom Rowland: And you already knew what was happening because of the ride over.

Billy Davis: Yeah, I knew the skipjacks were there — I could tell. They don't publish when that steam plant's running, you have to drive by and look, and I drove by it every day, so I knew when it was going to come on. You could tell by the steam and stuff coming out of certain pipes — this thing's going to fire up in a couple of days. So I got to figure things out well before anybody else, and I'd go in there and catch fish two weeks before anybody else would even figure it out. I got the first run and wore them out before anybody else even showed up to catch them.

Tom Rowland: That's cool. So you're doing this after work, kind of smoking them, and when do you decide you're not going to do that job anymore and you're going to guide? Because at some point you have to get rid of that job somehow. That's pretty interesting to me because a lot of people who listen to this podcast are thinking about doing that in some way — going into the retail business, being a hunting guide, being a fishing guide — and some of the most interesting stories on this podcast have been about people's decision to make that move. So what was that like for you?

The Larry Dahlberg Break and Quitting the Day Job

Billy Davis: Well, I got my big break, I guess, back in 2010 — got to fish with Larry Dahlberg on The Hunt for Big Fish, and was fortunate enough to do really well. We landed fifty-inch muskie. We had a real good show that was kind of based on the over-harvesting of muskie around that steam plant, so it had a message behind it, and we caught a lot of fish, so it was well received. We also did a striper video and smacked them — went down below the dam and used all artificials and proved it, that you can have really, really good days. When those episodes aired, they were on NBC Sports — I guess he had a big deal — and everybody saw it, and those episodes were so good they replayed them a dozen times, two dozen times, I don't know. I was just doing this part-time at the time, but the demand for guiding was through the roof — I had a thousand emails. I told my wife at the time, she's no longer my wife, but I said, I think I can do this full-time, and she said, I don't think so — she called me a dreamer. I said, I think I can do this, and it got to the point where it was kind of silly to go to work, because you can raise your rates to whatever you want and make more in a weekend than you would all week at work. That's when you get to the point and say, I can't do this anymore. But the demand has to be there, because it is a big leap — to start any business, quit your job, and start your own business, whatever you do, it's a leap of faith. I knew I had enough people lined up — all I'd have to do is book three trips a week and I'd be okay. So it started out doing that, and it's just taken off and hasn't slowed down.

Tom Rowland: Did you have to invest in a new boat? What was that like, all of a sudden being a full-time guide?

Billy Davis: I started out with my sixteen-foot boat and quickly realized I could only take two people. The problem is when you try to go to the bank and say, I'm a fishing guy, I charge four to five hundred dollars a day, give me a boat loan, they say, nope, because you write everything off. So I've slowly built everything up, mainly with help from my dad — he helped me get a boat. Then over time I've worked and worked, and this new boat I just got, a Sea Ark twenty-six-foot modified-V, I bought an empty shell for around nine thousand dollars and built it out the way I wanted. I basically just paid cash for everything. I tell people all the time, you're only going to get out of it what you put into it.

Tom Rowland: Well, you seem to be putting in a tremendous amount, and having fished with you a few times now, you could see it — you're a hardworking guy. Where do you get your work ethic?

Billy Davis: It's my dad. He does heating and air, but he's always doing something — he helps out the community, he loves to fish, he's always walleye fished. I just go, go, go, and I think a lot of guides have that — some ADD or whatever, just being drawn out there. If I go a day or two without going, it messes with my head, because I've got a trip coming and the main thing is I need to find skipjacks.

Skipjack Herring: The Lifeblood of the Bite

Billy Davis: The skipjack herring is kind of the lifeblood of my guiding. That's what sets me apart — being able to locate those skipjacks. You put a skipjack out there and that's going to tell you exactly where the stripers are. You can spend five minutes on a spot, put a skipjack out whether they're biting or not, and that skipjack will tell you where the stripers are — any kind of bait, you could chum, and if it takes off running, you know there's something there.

Tom Rowland: Right — even if they're not biting, the bait senses them and takes off.

Billy Davis: Yeah, and you can tell by the speed of the movement of that skipjack — this is where we want to be. And sometimes you've got to wait them out.

Tom Rowland: Right — they're not necessarily attacking the bait right away, but the bait's running so fast, it's a nervous bait, you may not be getting the bite but you know you've got a nervous bait. Tell me about the rig you're using with this skipjack, so people understand how you're seeing this bait running, and what size these baits are.

Billy Davis: What I use — I'll go ahead and say I use a bait-casting reel, I use a Tranx with a musky rod, and I'll have braid on there most of the time. We use an eight-to-twelve-foot leader, depending on the water clarity, and then I'll use a Trokar circle hook, and sometimes I'll put a stinger hook on there, a little treble in the belly of the fish. We put a balloon ten to twelve feet up and let them float around — they'll swim all over, and you basically read the balloon, and it's going to tell you where those fish are, because they'll run and you can gauge it. When you get in a big school of fish, that skipjack really has no idea where he wants to go — he'll go twenty feet one way, then turn back around quickly, and you can really gauge when those fish are about to eat, because that skipjack will go this way, this way, this way, and then it gets tighter, then it comes up to the surface, and I call it the circle of death, and I say, you're about to get nailed. It's probably really similar to what you'd see in the ocean.

Tom Rowland: Well, yeah — some fish are like that and other fish aren't. That seems almost like the way a barracuda does it — it just kind of goes around, doesn't attack right away. But you'll see similar behavior with a tarpon at night, or a big snook, same kind of thing, if you had a bait on a balloon or a cork. That's pretty cool. So this skipjack herring, is that a native fish?

Billy Davis: I think it's actually a saltwater fish that's migrated up from the Gulf of Mexico. Over the years they've gone up the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Tennessee River, and the only place they can go up to is Knoxville — that's as high as they can get. So I believe they're a saltwater species that's come here over time.

Striped Bass 101: Saltwater Fish in Freshwater Reservoirs

Tom Rowland: That's super interesting, because one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is the striped bass — it's a saltwater species. A lot of people may be confused. I may be one of them. You have the striped bass that runs the coast, that people are crazy about fishing for all up and down the Northeast — it's a very sought-after fish, and there's been a moratorium on them at times because they were so pressured. They're good to eat, great to fish for, lots of people out on the beaches, fishing in wetsuits, fishing all night — it's a fish that drives people insane, a lot like a tarpon, a lot like a bonefish. Now where people might get confused is there's striped bass in freshwater that you fish for — that's your fish — and then there are also hybrid bass that look kind of similar, with stripes too. So tell us about that.

Billy Davis: Well, they figured out, back in the forties or fifties, when they dammed up Santee Cooper in South Carolina — the Santee and Cooper rivers, I believe — they dammed those up and realized the stripers could thrive in freshwater. They run way up these rivers, a hundred and fifty or so miles, and they do this in all the rivers on the East Coast — they run up to spawn, lay their eggs, and the eggs hatch. It takes seventy-two hours at two miles an hour for their eggs to stay suspended, so that's about a hundred and fifty miles. When they dammed the Santee Cooper and realized these stripers get real big, they're ferocious feeders and help control shad populations, they started stocking stripers in a lot of reservoirs for these stripers to really thrive, and they've figured out which reservoirs they'll do good in. East Tennessee has an abundance of reservoirs where stripers thrive.

Tom Rowland: Is that where the man-made dams create the cool water they need?

Billy Davis: Yes — the water that comes out through the dams is cool.

Tom Rowland: The bottom, the geography — but that'd be the river down below. So the reservoirs, are they looking for ones with springs, or very deep reservoirs?

Billy Davis: They have streams, and yes, they do have big springs, and that's where you'll have stripers in some reservoirs you might not think should have them.

Tom Rowland: Gotcha. One question before we move on — those stripers that went into Santee Cooper when they dammed it up, did they continue to reproduce naturally if they can't go out into the ocean?

Billy Davis: Like I said, the eggs have to stay in suspension for seventy-two hours — that's seventy-two hours at two miles an hour, a hundred-and-forty-four-mile-long river needed. The rivers here just aren't that long before the eggs fall out. Our rivers are twenty miles long, so they'll settle out.

Tom Rowland: So everything you're fishing for is a fish that is not going to reproduce?

Billy Davis: Yes, correct.

Tom Rowland: And that would be the case just because they're in freshwater — but the saltwater fish on the coast, they're running up rivers, and that's why they're along the coast, hitting these rivers, like the Hudson River is probably a big one.

Billy Davis: You'll hear about the big river run — that's what they do, they're running up to spawn.

Tom Rowland: Okay, that makes more sense. That clears it up for a lot of people — you kind of look at the fish and the landlocked ones and the natural ocean stripers seem to be more thin, more athletic looking.

Billy Davis: They probably have a lot more predators, and a lot more area to cover to catch bait and keep up. Whereas on a reservoir or river, you don't have to go very far — the bait's going to come to you for the most part. These stripers will sit on a point and just wait for a ball of bait to come by — the waters are so much more contained, and that's kind of part of the reason they put stripers in there, to keep the bait populations in check.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, and it's working, because a big part of stocking programs is to raise money for the environment — when we buy fishing licenses, when anglers come into town, it's good for the economy, our fishing tackle money goes toward conservation. So the idea is get people out on the water, have them enjoy themselves, catch a trophy fish, and it's working.

Billy Davis: Yes. They put two hundred fifty thousand stripers a year into Watts Bar Reservoir, and that fuels several other reservoirs because they move through the dams — they'll go through the locks when they're opened and get introduced into other reservoirs. It's all dependent on stocking and people buying fishing licenses.

Knowing the Bait Better Than Anyone

Tom Rowland: That might be ground you don't necessarily want to tread, but I'm super interested, because the best saltwater fishing guides I know are the ones who know the bait the best. On tough days, they get the bait — it's not about where the fish are or if they're biting, it's whether you're still trying to catch bait at noon, because then you're probably not going to have a great day, but somebody who caught bait at eight-thirty is probably going to have a great day. It's all about knowing that bait, and the best fishermen I know, know the bait — whether they're artificial-lure fishermen or they never throw a cast net once in their life, they know where that bait is and how the fish respond to it. You live and die by the skipjack herring — how do you keep your finger on the pulse of where they are?

Billy Davis: I spend way more time scouting bait than I do anything else. Not only do I have to find out where the skipjacks are, I have to find out where the threadfin shad are, because the threadfin shad are what the skipjacks eat. There's a there — we have to catch bait to catch bait. I spend a lot of time during certain times of the year finding those spawning grounds, because if you know where those are, that's where the skipjacks are going to be.

Tom Rowland: So a day with you starts out by catching bait. Explain the bait-catching process.

Billy Davis: Sabiki rigs work. Sometimes I'll take two little crappie jigs, maybe eighteen or twenty inches apart, and throw those — we'll use a popping cork with a jig on it sometimes, we'll use spoons. I start out with several different things and go with whatever they're biting best. I'm trying to get ten to fifteen skipjacks into my bait tank — I've got a hundred-gallon bait tank, which I think is a necessity, and that's why I had to get a bigger boat, this twenty-six-footer, to store all my rods plus have that hundred-gallon tank. I think that's kind of what set me apart from other guides — it's a huge investment just to have a boat that size to haul a bait tank. You've got to go all in if you're going to do the skipjack thing.

Tom Rowland: What's difficult about keeping them — does it have a filter on it? Every bait we keep, from pinfish to pilchards to ballyhoo to threadfin herring, you have to be careful — you use the hookers and don't touch some baits, you can cast-net other baits, you can only put so many in certain wells, and you learn all this over time. What's hard about keeping the skipjack — what's the challenge?

Billy Davis: First of all, they need cold, cooler water. They need plenty of area to swim around because they don't sit still — they're always constantly moving. And you need to have the salinity right — that's one thing most people don't worry about. I actually have a little meter on my boat to keep the salinity right where it needs to be.

Tom Rowland: Even if you're using the water from right where you caught them, filling your tank with that, the salinity can still get off with the bait in there?

Billy Davis: Yeah. It's all — I've killed more bait than anybody, but that's how you learn.

Tom Rowland: That is how you learn. And on the days where you're having some tough days, do you have some tricks?

Billy Davis: I have a few tricks up my sleeve — it's got to be very bad conditions not to get bait. I invested in Live Scope, and skipjacks have a particular way they swim — they move real fast and kind of go in circles, so I can look at that Live Scope, pull into a cove, pan around, and look at each individual school of fish, and I can tell those are skipjacks. You can take your jigs, throw them out to that school, let them sink down, and get them more often than not. It's a game changer — when you can sit there, look at the fish, and see just by the movement what they are, and then go catch them.

Live Scope, Drones, and the Technology Changing the Game

Tom Rowland: Lowrance came out with similar technology this year and we've been using it. The first time we used it, we marked tarpon with it swimming by a bridge, and it was unbelievable — we could throw our lures out there and see how the fish reacted. We also started using it for mullet — the mullet will make a mud, and we're in there trying to throw the cast net, looking for one to flip or do something, otherwise you have no idea. You can't see anything until this new technology, and you start panning around and see a school of mullet coming at you, and you're like, okay, three, two, one, throw, and boom.

Billy Davis: You know how many are in your net before you even pull it up.

Tom Rowland: It's amazing — because sometimes you'd throw the net and see the bait swim right under it as it's falling, and you're like, I don't think you got any, and maybe you come up with one or two, and it's like, well, we were on them, but it's just too deep or too slow. That's super cool, man — that bait-catching and what you're doing with it.

Billy Davis: It is. But in that, I also love the challenge, because I am kind of one of the only guys that really does this — it's kind of neat that I figured a lot of it out.

Tom Rowland: How many baits can you put in a hundred gallons without damaging them?

Billy Davis: Say an average fifteen-inch skipjack — I can probably put fifteen in there and keep them all day.

Tom Rowland: So they need a lot of water. If those were mullet, we could put a lot more in.

Billy Davis: Well, the mullet are smaller.

Tom Rowland: A sixteen-inch skipjack — what fish eats that? A twenty-pounder, thirty-pounder?

Billy Davis: Twenty-pounders have no problem gobbling that.

Tom Rowland: That's what I like, man — big bait, big fish. That's the first thing I thought when I went fishing with you — that's bait? Right on, this is going to be fun.

Billy Davis: Oh, yeah — and just watching them beat it up is half the fun. It's basically doing what they're going to do in nature anyway, you just get to see it, and they're eventually going to get them anyway.

Tom Rowland: Well, one of the best bites in all of fishing, in my opinion, is a tarpon eating a live mullet, and a lot of fly fishermen miss out on this because they never get to see it — but if you're a tarpon fisherman, you should see it. And I'll tell you what, a close second is a giant striper eating one of these skipjack herring — it's pretty awesome, man. What have you got going on?

Billy Davis: Especially — this happened today, we saw it earlier — when that striper corners it against the boat, you're sitting there watching this, the striper's oblivious to you, and it's just an awesome thing to watch.

Tom Rowland: It would use the boat — if it pinned it up against the boat —

Billy Davis: I've had them smack it right up against it and take off with it.

Tom Rowland: Just like if it was a log — like you're a log floating in the middle of the river, and if that bait got up against the log, he's going to smash it.

Billy Davis: Oh, yeah — we've done so many, I've seen them all knock them two feet out of the water. I've shot some really cool drone video, overhead, where you think it's one striper chasing a skipjack, and you watch the drone footage and there's actually a whole group of them working it. It really shows you how cautious they are, too — these fish are a little smarter than we give them credit for. One thing I've noticed, and I explain this to a lot of people — that striper's sitting up there pounding on that skipjack, and they ask, why isn't he eating it? I say, well, my theory is that's a male striper wanting to kill that skipjack for a female. I'll actually take a skipjack, bash it over the head, and throw it out there under a balloon, and it's not a fifteen-pounder that comes up and grabs it — it's a twenty-eight-to-thirty-four-pounder, it's the female. So my theory is the male striper will sometimes kill the bait to lead the female to it. I figured that out years ago, just frustrated, wondering why aren't these things eating them — they'd hit it, hit it, hit it, and I could see the fish wasn't that big, but then when it sinks down and grabs it, that was a big one, and I'd think, that might be a female. When it happens three or four or five times, you're like, there's something to that — every time that happens, you catch a big fish. So now, when I see that, I'll pull out my Boga Grip, bash them over the head, throw it back out there, and bam, we're catching fish. It's little tricks you learn along the way, and you gain much more respect for these fish, because they're way more complex than we probably ever thought.

Growth Rates and the Life of a Reservoir Striper

Tom Rowland: What do you know about the life cycle and the complexity of these stripers, and what does the stocking program look like?

Billy Davis: Well, I know Norris, they'll put a hundred twenty-five thousand fish in at two inches, and Watts Bar, they'll put in two hundred fifty thousand — each lake has different stocking rates. You know, these ten-pound stripers might be three to four years old, and when they get up to twenty pounds, they're probably eight to nine years old — they'll get up to thirty pounds at probably thirteen to fourteen. So these fish that guys like to put on the wall are probably older than their kids — it's not like a deer that only lives six years, these fish can live twenty-five years.

Tom Rowland: Twenty-five years, that's —

Billy Davis: Yeah, and that sixty-five-pound fish — they've been proven to grow that big here.

Tom Rowland: Wow. And it says loud and clear right on your website, one of the first things you tell everybody, even me —

Billy Davis: Always have been — catch and release.

Tom Rowland: Tell me about that decision.

Billy Davis: Well, I kind of grew up fishing for sixty-pound fish, but then as I got into it, I realized how rare they are, and there's only certain places you can even access that kind of fishing. It takes a real special environment to grow a fish that big over a long time. You'll have forty-pounders, a really nice fish, but if you let that fish go, with the water temps allowing it, the fish can get bigger — it's fifteen, sixteen years on its way to being a fifty- or sixty-pound fish. So I've kind of seen the pinnacle of how good it can be, but with the internet and all this, I've also seen the decline in a lot of areas, so I'd rather — me being selfish — just see them swimming than give everybody a chance to keep one.

Tom Rowland: I mean, you've been doing this a long time, so people probably know what they're getting into at this point, but it probably wasn't always that way, having a catch-and-release policy on your boat.

Billy Davis: Yeah, I've had some people say, hey, are you seriously catch and release? And I say, if you want to mount a fish, there's plenty of other guides who will take you and let you keep fish and mount them, but I don't want to use my boat or my methods to go out and target these fish just to kill them. If it happens naturally, yeah, but to go out and say I want to put one on the wall — I'd say get a replica mount, or even get canvas prints of the pictures if you want something to hang on the wall.

Tom Rowland: Well, I'd think — what's the replica-mount situation? That's one of the places you mount the most fish in the entire world down here — everything's a replica mount.

Billy Davis: Yeah, I think stripers are such a complex paint job that I haven't seen too many replicas that really, really look good. Just until somebody down there can really nail it —

Tom Rowland: They could do it — there's a guy who does these amazing mounts, and what he's doing is taking a photograph of the fish. He's got well, sailfish is one of the fish he mounts, so let's use that as an example — he's got literally thousands of molds of sailfish, so if you caught one of a certain girth and length, he's got one within a half-inch, within a millimeter, and over the years he's built up so many of these. Then he takes a picture of it, and if it has a damaged tail, an interesting coloration, a scar, he incorporates all of that. He just sits there with the gun airbrush and does it, and I guarantee you he could do a striped bass, a hundred percent — it would be way easier than some of these other fish he's doing.

Billy Davis: Might be worth giving it a shot. He's a nice guy to work with.

What Keeps a 300-Day Guide Going

Tom Rowland: Anyway, so what drives you day to day — you're fishing three hundred days a year and you're as excited to go out tomorrow as you were the day before?

Billy Davis: I guess that's one factor — I don't want to go back to a regular job. I enjoy seeing people do things they've never done before. I don't have to catch another striper myself to consider my fishing career complete, but I do enjoy seeing the kids do it, and I enjoy taking out guys in their mid-eighties who've fished their whole lives and say, I've never caught a fish like this. That gets me, because I want to be that guy who gets to go out and really enjoy it. Every morning, four-thirty, five o'clock, I'm ready to go. I'm forty-two now, I've probably fished as much as anybody over the last twenty years, and I can see myself doing it another twenty. The sun and the heat get to me, though — after ten in the morning I've come to realize it's just not as efficient, it's not worth it.

Tom Rowland: That's when you're getting the most action, before sunrise to about ten o'clock.

Billy Davis: Well, my saying is fish don't have eyelids and they can't wear hats or sunglasses, so when you start reaching for your shades, they kind of really slow down. And when you start hearing the jarflies in the trees and the sun's peeking through — there's one other thing. There's a couple of bald eagles that stay below Melton Hill Dam, and when they're real low to the water, fishing's good, but as those eagles make their way up the ridge and you can see them sitting way up on top, that's when the fishing's over with.

Reading Eagles and Reservoir Patterns

Tom Rowland: So what correlation are you making with the eagles?

Billy Davis: I think they see the bait and they sit up there and see big fish cruising by. I'll have a skipjack get knocked off, and it drifts a quarter or half a mile down the river, and then it comes up, and they're sitting up there watching — they see the clouds of bait come up, see the stripers, the blue herons, everything. They've got eagle eyes, a bird's-eye view of the whole thing. And I can tell too, because I've got the Live Scope — when everything starts going down, the fish just don't want to come up anymore.

Tom Rowland: And so the eagles have to get higher on the ridge to see down into the water, just like we do.

Billy Davis: I think they're just done — they're done feeding, so they'll go up there and keep an eye on things, but they don't attack our baits, they just sit up there and chill out.

Tom Rowland: That's interesting — man, it's amazing how far away those eagles can see a baitfish. We had one at Seven Mile Bridge — we were fishing with a live mullet, it died, we threw it out, and there was a bald eagle sitting on the bridge that came from way off and swooped down on that single mullet right behind the boat. It was pretty cool — you probably have that happen way more than we do in the Keys, but I've never seen a bald eagle do that there before. Further back in the Everglades we see them all the time, but that particular spot was strange — he flew so far to eat it, and that's where he came from. It would be so cool to have eyes like an eagle, to see anything from that far away.

Billy Davis: Yep — but when I do this every single day, I get to anticipate it, and it really helps to sit there and say, hey, you see that bald eagle? These fish are going to bite until that bald eagle goes up. And more often than not, when that sun comes up over the ridge and it seems to go dead, you look up and the eagle's gone. I think people now know what to expect — I'm not going to sit out there all day in the sun and just fry myself.

Tom Rowland: You look pretty red today, man.

Billy Davis: I am, I am — but that's just patterns you figure out every day, and that's how you can fish three hundred days a year, you pace yourself and fish the best times. I'm constantly checking — there's an app I use that gives you the best hunting and fishing times, and I tell people, hey, these things, we might want to wait around, because there's a major feed coming up at ten-thirty, and I think it does trump the moon phases.

Logging Three Decades of Catches

Tom Rowland: Have you kept a journal over the years?

Billy Davis: I have not — this is the first year I've actually logged how many stripers we've caught. I just now found this app back in January and figured I'd try it, because I'd tell people —

Tom Rowland: It'd be like my buddies in Louisiana who have a doorman's clicker mounted right by their trolling motor and hit it with their foot every time they catch one.

Billy Davis: But so far, as of October twelfth, I think I'm at seven hundred eighty stripers over fifteen pounds. Those are the ones I kind of —

Tom Rowland: And, man, I couldn't believe it when I first went there, but they said, well, how many fish do you think we caught today, and I said, I don't know, like sixty? They said, thirty-two. And I'm like, well, okay — that's why you do it, because if you actually count them, it's not as many as you think. It's really easy to say, man, we must have caught a hundred fish today. In your brain, that's what gets you — your brain.

Billy Davis: So I just use that Anglers' Log app, and it's pretty — I'm probably not going to do it next year, honestly, but it lets me look at a picture of a fish caught fifteen years ago and it'll give me a date for when that picture was taken, even if I don't remember exactly where.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, that is interesting with the apps and technology — even just taking a picture on your phone will record the date and time. That's pretty interesting, because we were just doing this the other day, wondering what time of day it was when we caught something before, and I went through my phone and found the picture, and it said exactly what time I took it. That was interesting, because from that you can look back at exactly what the tide was doing — you can go back through the old tide tables. There was one point where I was talking about how the most important thing to record, when you're fishing against the tide, is the time of day you caught the fish and where you caught it. So if you just take a picture, now you've got the time of day, the date, and the picture of the fish on your phone — all you've got to do is remember where it was, hit your GPS mark, and you're good to go. Then you can go back later and figure out what the tide was, so you can try to replicate that situation. We talked about technology before — you've mentioned a couple of different things. What have been the biggest changes — the Live Scope, or what Lowrance is calling Active Target, is the same kind of technology, and you mentioned drones. What else have you used that's changed the way you fish?

Google Earth, Social Media, and Guiding Responsibly

Billy Davis: That's a good question. Of course, just cell phones and being able to share information — I have a couple of buddies who might slip up and show a picture and you can kind of tell the background. But I guess, besides that, I can't really think of anything else that's really changed it, other than Google Earth — you can find any boat ramp now, and that's kind of a good or bad thing, because with Google Earth people can watch a video and start picking up on landmarks.

Tom Rowland: And that leads to the discussion of social media and responsible use of it for fishing guides — what's your opinion there?

Billy Davis: I think it's a necessary evil. You still want to show that, yeah, we're catching fish, so you have to do the Instagram — or I feel like I have to — and the Facebook, just to let people know, hey, I'm still here. I don't post — I don't make YouTube videos. I think YouTube has really damaged some of the good spots around here, especially on the skipjacks. Several of our local YouTubers like to expose the skipjack spots, and I'm kind of bitter about that. I'll show that we catch stripers, but that's about it.

Tom Rowland: It is a fine line, a very fine line. When I first started fishing it was — and then you just figure it out, and you're like, okay, you guys got a little respect, you know, and then it's just changed so much. Now it's mostly social media.

Billy Davis: Yeah. As soon as they catch a fish, they're doing the Facebook Live. A lot of guides around here — the out-of-state guides — kind of don't really respect anything that we've done, so they'll go live when they catch fish, right here, right now, and that's kind of irresponsible. If you want to put up a video once the fish have moved off a spot, that makes more sense than saying, come on, let's go, right here, right now — because that leads to way too many people fishing these spots, and when the fish get over-pressured, they're gone, they'll move. So I'm a little bitter about that.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, it's the world we live in, unfortunately.

Billy Davis: Oh, yeah — but there's fish all over the place too. When there's a lot of boats moving into an area, the big fish that have been caught before, I think they move, but I've kind of got plan B's for when there's too many boats in an area — I've got plenty of other places to go.

Booking a Trip with Melton Hill Bill

Tom Rowland: Well, you're obviously doing a lot of things right to be booking that many days and going out, and I can say, just from my own personal experience, you're a good guy to spend the day with, you know a lot about the fishing you're doing, and you make it an enjoyable time. I've taken my kids with you, I've taken other people with you, it's been great, and I look forward to doing it again. What would somebody do if they wanted to book a trip with you? Are you booked up way in advance, or how does somebody do it?

Billy Davis: It really depends — April and May I'll book up almost already. I may have a couple of days left in April. You know, just get on my website, meltonhillbill.com — all the information's up there, all my available dates are up there. I'm pretty easy to get a hold of too, on Instagram and Facebook.

Tom Rowland: Is that what you'd consider the peak — April and May?

Billy Davis: In my opinion, that's when they go to spawn. All these stripers run up out of the reservoirs to certain areas up the rivers, so I've figured out where a lot of these big congregations of spawning females go. And a lot of times I've realized it's kind of like a largemouth bass on a bed — you put something in front of them, they're not necessarily going to eat it, but one thing they really don't want around the area where they're trying to spawn is something that's going to eat their eggs — a frisky skipjack, they will kill every one of them. I run a jet boat to get up to those spawning grounds.

Tom Rowland: And that happens April, May —

Billy Davis: May, yeah.

Tom Rowland: But then, I've fished with you in the dead of winter, in January.

Billy Davis: Yeah, that was when we were fishing that Bull Run coal-fired steam plant — that water was probably in the low sixties, they didn't know it was January. There's not a week out of the year I don't expect to catch a thirty-pound fish, because I can always find the right water. Stripers are a cold-water fish, so their metabolism doesn't really slow down until forty-four degrees — that seems to be where they'll quit eating the skipjacks, they might eat smaller bait, shiners and stuff, but I just want to catch them on the skipjack. So when the water gets to forty-five or below, I'll just move to the steam plants, and that's when they really pile up there, and we've got several of them around here, so I've always got somewhere to go, no matter how cold it gets.

Tom Rowland: I don't think you will slow down. I'm even questioning whether you're going to take half-days tomorrow, but judging by your sunburn today, you might need to.

Billy Davis: Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing too.

Tom Rowland: That's sweet, man — you need to send a selfie without your hat, that would be amazing.

Billy Davis: Yeah, I can do it. I started going to church with my wife, and it's one of those come-as-you-are churches, so I wear my hat and they don't mind.

Tom Rowland: Well, you stand out a lot more when you take your hat off, if they make you.

Billy Davis: Yeah, people notice — it's just time on the water, that's how you get this.

Tom Rowland: That's right, man, that's right. Well, Billy, it's been great — I look forward to fishing with you again. And if anybody wants a great experience, this is a trip worthy of leaving the Keys. A lot of people leave the Keys and go up north, to Tennessee or Georgia, and a lot of people are coming your way — they want to see the mountains, they want a little cooler weather. This is one you should put on your list — it's a great one.

Billy Davis: Yeah, I'm right off I-75, so you can just come right up 75, and I'm right near Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, Dollywood — about forty-five minutes away. So you can do all that while you're up here.

Tom Rowland: There you go.

Billy Davis: Sounds good, man.

Tom Rowland: Alright, Billy — thanks, man, we'll talk to you soon.

Billy Davis: Alright, alright. You have a good one.

Tom Rowland: See you.