Brent Ehrler: Major League Fishing Life and Dieting on the Road

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 798: Life of a Major League Fisherman and Dieting on the Road, with Brent Ehrler.

Meet Brent Ehrler

Tom Rowland: Today's guest is pro bass fisherman Brent Ehrler. Brent and I met at a Mercury event a long time ago, and I thought he was really cool -- we got along great. He's a bass fisherman from California, and recently he's been putting a lot of stuff on his social media about diet and fitness and how that's affected his fishing, so I thought that would be interesting. We have a great conversation about diet and fitness, and then we talk a lot about bass fishing -- his experience on the different tours, what he's been able to accomplish, and who he's fished up against. I hope you'll stick around for this great conversation with Mercury Pro, Power-Pole Pro, Daiwa Pro, and Lucky Craft pro Brent Ehrler.

Tom Rowland: Brent, what's going on? How are you, man?

Brent Ehrler: Doing great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, I've been wanting to have you on for a long time. We're on the Mercury Pro team together, we're on the Daiwa Pro team together, probably a couple of others, and I've really always wanted to have you on the podcast. You're a pro bass fisherman, obviously doing extremely well in that. Been doing it for how long?

Brent Ehrler: Oh, man. I've been doing it full time now -- I think I've done sixteen full seasons.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that's incredible. We're gonna get back into that. And your home is California?

Brent Ehrler: Yes, I live in Redlands, California. I'm kind of in between Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

Tom Rowland: Okay, very cool. Well, I'm very interested to see how this all got started, but first we're gonna put you on the hot seat. We've got one minute -- we're gonna see how many of these questions we can get through. So I'm just gonna run through these questions, and you go through them as fast as you can. Are you ready?

Brent Ehrler: I'm ready.

Lightning Round: Getting to Know Brent Ehrler

Tom Rowland: Sunrise or sunset?

Brent Ehrler: Sunrise.

Tom Rowland: Text or call?

Brent Ehrler: Text.

Tom Rowland: Drive or fly?

Brent Ehrler: Drive.

Tom Rowland: East Coast or West Coast?

Brent Ehrler: West Coast.

Tom Rowland: Largemouth or smallmouth?

Brent Ehrler: Largemouth.

Tom Rowland: Spinnerbait or spin-casting?

Brent Ehrler: Spin.

Tom Rowland: Woah, okay, cool. Favorite state to bass fish?

Brent Ehrler: Texas.

Tom Rowland: Winter Olympics or Summer Olympics?

Brent Ehrler: Winter, for sure.

Tom Rowland: Instagram or Twitter?

Brent Ehrler: Instagram.

Tom Rowland: Mountain bike or snowboard?

Brent Ehrler: Mountain bike, for sure.

Tom Rowland: Chocolate or vanilla?

Brent Ehrler: Chocolate.

Tom Rowland: Coffee, tea, or energy drink?

Brent Ehrler: Coffee, one hundred percent.

Tom Rowland: Audiobook, Kindle, or paper?

Brent Ehrler: Audio.

Tom Rowland: Movie that makes you laugh? What do you listen to on long drives?

Brent Ehrler: Joe Rogan podcast.

Tom Rowland: Country, rock, or rap?

Brent Ehrler: Country and rap -- or, sorry, country rap, I guess. I'm not a rock guy.

Tom Rowland: Okay, I like it -- you made it through sixteen, that's probably a new record. I shortened a couple of them. Alright, so these are the questions that we're starting to ask everybody. The best advice you've ever been given, if you can remember that.

Brent Ehrler: You know, my dad is always big on what he calls the six P's: proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance. I'm one of those kids -- my dad was a tough guy, and I don't like to give him credit, but he was right about a lot of things. Being prepared for stuff, and over-preparing, is a big deal. I use that a lot in fishing. It comes down to hoping for the best but preparing for the worst -- you always have to be prepared.

Tom Rowland: That's cool, and the six P's will definitely come in handy in fishing, for sure -- that's my experience anyway. Alright, three non-negotiables that you have in your life.

Brent Ehrler: Oh, man, non-negotiables -- I've never been asked that question, never really thought about that. Family -- my wife, Kelly, and my son, Ollie -- they're a huge part of my life. We have a great little family. Just the one son, but they're a big deal, so that's something I would never compromise.

Tom Rowland: Okay, awesome, that's one. What about two others?

Brent Ehrler: Right now, diet. I'm really big on a healthy diet. My cheating on my diet is I've had rice here and there, mashed potatoes here and there -- probably in the last year, it's been less than six bowls of rice and probably three bowls of mashed potatoes. But right now they're really strict on my diet -- I'm full gas on everything. I'm not the person who can cheat a little bit here and there -- once I start cheating, it's full gas in every direction. So diet's one, and exercise is another one right now. I do push-ups every day -- even on days where I go to the gym and I'm gonna do a chest exercise, I still do push-ups in my house. So diet's one, exercise is the other, right now.

How Diet and Fitness Changed His Fishing

Tom Rowland: That's fantastic, and another reason why I wanted to have you on the podcast -- in the world of fishing, not everybody takes as good care of themselves as that. Is the diet thing that you're doing over the last couple of years out of necessity? You've always been kind of a fit guy from when I've known you, but it seems like in the last couple years you've really taken it to another level. Is it helping your performance on the water? Is that one of the things going on?

Brent Ehrler: It does, for sure. It helps you in every aspect of life. If you're physically fatigued, you're gonna be mentally fatigued, so if you're physically fit, you're gonna make better decisions -- you're gonna have a little bit more mental clarity. If you're physically fatigued, you can't make the right decisions. Fishing, it's just fishing -- it's really not that big of a deal. I look at some of the guys that beat me daily, and they couldn't even walk a mile, let alone jog and do push-ups. So it's not the end-all-be-all to be a good fisherman, but for me I feel like it helps give me that drive to compete against the guys. I felt stronger this season than I have in any other season, and diet and exercise is that reason why.

A Season on the Road: Major League Fishing's Schedule

Tom Rowland: Tell me about your annual schedule -- how many days are you on the road? What tours are you doing? Just for people that are familiar with bass fishing but not intimately, what does that look like?

Brent Ehrler: Being from the West Coast, from California, I start the season by driving from California to my first event. Almost every season will start in Florida, because in February that's the start of the season -- you can't really go to certain parts of the country in February, so there's a really good chance you're gonna have good weather in Florida. So I'll drive from my house in Southern California to Florida, I'll fish that event, and then I'll drive to the next event, or drive somewhere in between, leave the boat and truck, and then fly home and fly back and start that whole scenario over again. Each tournament is about ten days long from when I fly out. I usually get there -- I fly out two days prior to practice, so I have one day to get all my tackle ready, get the boat ready, gas up the boat, go to the market, get groceries for the week. I'll also meal prep on that day before. And then we have two days of practice that we're allowed to scout around the lake, so I try to maximize my time. I know guys out there that, let's say if it's lines in in the morning at 7 AM, they won't get on the water until 7 AM, and it'll be lines out at 4 PM, meaning that's when it's the stop time. They'll stop fishing at four because they think that if they find anything after 4:00 it's not gonna help them later in the tournament. I don't understand why guys do that -- guys come in early, they hang out, they drink, they eat, they do the whole thing. For me, it's dark to dark. I am on the water when we are allowed to be on the water, and I'm off the water when we're supposed to be off the water.

Inside the Format: Run Time, Scoring, and Camera Boats

Tom Rowland: I'm on the mind of fish, but you can map the lake and look around and do other things like that -- what does the rules say?

Brent Ehrler: We're allowed to fish, so we go out and fish, and we try to find where we wanna spend our time in the tournament. But it's from seven to four in the tournament, meaning that we'll take off at 6:30 -- it's a new format. I fish Major League Fishing, the Bass Pro Tour, and the way we have it is, in the past, most of our tournaments they call your name, you run out, and you're on the clock right then and there. So if you wanted to stop and fish right there at takeoff, you could do that, but if you're gonna run an hour and a half, seventy, eighty miles to get to your spot, you've wasted seventy or eighty miles of fishing time to get there. The way it works in our format now, we have a thirty-minute run-around period at the start of the day. We take off, they call our numbers -- say I'm boat number one, I'm the first guy they call, I take off and I run to where I wanna fish, but I have thirty minutes. So if I'm only running five minutes, that means I sit there and wait twenty-five minutes before I can start fishing, because at 7:00, whatever the time is, that is lines in. I have an official in the boat that has an official scoreboard, which is an iPad with the times, our weights, everything. So we'll run out to a spot and I'll sit there and wait, and he'll give me a countdown -- two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds, fifteen, ten, nine, eight -- and then as lines went in, I start fishing. We have three two-and-a-half-hour periods, and in between those periods we have a fifteen-minute period break. The reason why they do this is that they have ten cameras on ten camera boats throughout the lake, and they rotate those cameras to different people -- if I'm doing well in the tournament, they'll bring a cameraman to me, and next thing I know I'm live on the web and app, fishing in the actual tournament. We do that throughout the day, and at the end of the third period it's the same thing: two minutes left, one minute, thirty seconds, ten, nine, eight, lines out, no longer fishing -- that's usually at 4:00. The neat thing about that is that if you're fishing a long ways away -- I've done it where I've run a hundred miles in one direction -- you have to worry about that run period coming back, so if you're running a hundred miles, you're only gonna fish for probably two or three hours.

The Miserable Lake Erie Run

Brent Ehrler: The whole time you're fishing, you're worried about, well, how about that wind -- is it gonna take me longer to get home? You never know, and you can't speed up. If you're going a hundred miles, there's no way you're gonna get there faster than you're gonna get there. There's nothing you can do -- the boat's only gonna go so fast. I have a Ranger boat with a two-fifty Mercury on it, and it tops out at 68, 70 miles an hour, so there's no way I can get there faster, and believe me, I tried. There were so many times where I worried I was gonna be late, and I have a hot foot -- T-H Marine makes one of those hot foots, so it's like driving a car -- and I push that thing down as hard as I possibly can, thinking that I'm gonna go a little faster. You never do. But our format is different now -- when it's lines out, it's lines out, and I can cruise in as fast or as slow as I want. If it's rough, I can take my time, so it's kind of a neat format. The other thing too is that we don't have weigh-ins anymore -- we don't keep the fish in the boat, keep them alive, and release the smaller ones when we catch bigger ones. This is a catch, weigh, and release format, so that's why that official is there. I catch a fish, he weighs it, tells me the weight, then punches it into the scoreboard so I know exactly where I'm at at all times of the day. I could be in last place, I could be in first place, and I know that's the actual leaderboard -- it's not an estimate, it's a true leaderboard, so you know at all times where you stand in the tournament. We used to count every fish -- that's how we started -- but we've gone away from that now. We're on a five-fish limit, so we're only counting our five heaviest, but we still catch, weigh, and release.

Tom Rowland: So of the three tours, three different formats, different schedules -- is there one that you feel your skill set lends itself to better than the others? Because when you change the rules of anything, you change the strategy of that tournament. I just wonder, in your decision to fish this one, is that because you feel like your skills lend themselves better to this one, or is there other reasons why you would pick one over another?

Brent Ehrler: Gotcha. So for me, I started fishing FLW -- that was the first place I fished, the national circuit, the FLW tour. I did that for close to ten years, and the whole time I was there, the names I grew up watching, listening to, reading about were all fishing on the Bass Elites -- guys like Kevin VanDam. People like that were over on the Bass Elites, and I wasn't there. I was doing well on the FLW side, but I didn't feel like I was fishing against those guys. I always say that to be the best, you have to beat the best, and I just felt like I wasn't fishing against the top-tier fishermen. So because of that I tried to qualify for the Bass Elites, and I qualified, and then I started fishing with those guys. During that process, I was invited to do the Major League Fishing format -- it was a brand new format, only twenty-four of us, and it was a catch-weigh-and-release format where every fish counted. It was kind of changing the bass fishing scene, but they were standalone tournaments -- we were only doing two a year. So now I was fishing on the Elite side against the guys I grew up reading about, and doing the standalone event too. Well, they started having a lot of success, so then they started their own format, the Bass Pro Tour -- their own national league. When they did that, they invited about eighty guys from the Bass Elites to go over there and fish the Major League Fishing Bass Pro Tour. It was a really tough decision -- Bass is such a great organization, the Bassmaster Classic, they really made a lot of careers, and it was awesome for me to be a part of them. But at the same time, all the guys were leaving, so it was one of those things where, again, I felt like to be the best I had to beat the best. So based on my feeling of who I wanted to compete against, I didn't really have a choice on what I was gonna do -- I went over and fished the Bass Pro Tour that was part of Major League Fishing. So it wasn't a format change that was something I wanted to do -- it was the anglers I was fishing against. Now all the leagues out there -- FLW is under the Major League Fishing umbrella, Major League Fishing bought FLW, so they have the Big 5 invitationals with some great fishermen there. The Bass Elites are still the Bass Elites, they have some great fishermen over there too. So right now, all the tours out there have the really good fishermen fishing, and I just felt like in order to feel like I was at the top of my game, I had to be fishing against the top of the game.

The Ten-Day Tournament Grind

Tom Rowland: Well, you've definitely found yourself right in the mix there, for sure. So, going back to your first leg heading to Florida -- you drive all the way across the country and start fishing in Florida. Then how long does that last, where do you go from there, and how many days are you spending away from home?

Brent Ehrler: Usually when I have to drive, it's more than ten days, because it takes me three days to get to Florida, so it'll be a good five, six days before I even start fishing prior to that tournament. I'll drive three days, I'll have two to prep and get ready once I get there, and then I'll practice for two days. The way our format works is that half the field fishes one day and the other half fishes the other day, so I'll compete one day, I'll have an off day, I'll compete again, and if I advance then I'll go to the next round. So once I'm at the event, I'll be there for ten days -- if I'm driving three plus those ten, I'm gone for essentially two weeks just for that event. Then I'll have a day drive, or a half-day drive, to get to the next event or wherever I'm gonna leave my rig, park it, and fly home. So the very first event, I'll end up being gone for about two and a half weeks just for that one event, and then come home and be home for a week, ten days, then fly back, fish that event, go through that whole ten-day rotation, drive to the next event, fly home. So I'll be gone for ten, twelve days, come home for ten days or two weeks, and then fly back and do it all over again.

Tom Rowland: And how many tournaments will you do that for?

Brent Ehrler: This year I'll have ten tournaments, so I'll be gone for a hundred-plus days just for the fishing side. Then I'll do some shows -- I work the Bassmaster Classic for sponsors, going to ICAST this next week, I'll do a few shows here and there in between, so add on another twenty, thirty days for that. So I think it works out that I'm gone about a hundred and fifty days a season, roughly, just for fishing, and that usually runs from about February until September, October.

Tom Rowland: Wow. And then when you get back after fishing a tournament, with ten days of things built up at home, and you want to spend time with your family -- how much time are you putting into thinking about the next tournament? Are you doing research on the internet, looking at aerial photos, catch records, or do you just try to spend time with family at that ten-day break?

Scouting, Research, and Respecting the Rules

Brent Ehrler: I spend most of the time with my family, for sure. I will research a few things here and there, but if it's a lake that I know, if it's a time of year that I know, I'll do less internet research, just because I've had the experience. The one thing I try not to do is get too dead-set on what you learn on the internet, because you look at tournament results or past tournaments -- you can watch a TV show from a tournament and it shows exactly what guys did, how they did it, where they did it, but it's never the same. You can't ever go off that stuff. The other problem is that out of the eighty guys I fish against, I bet sixty or seventy watch the same show, so they know exactly what happened and where it happened -- the same information you have. But it never goes down the exact same way. So I use it as kind of a base model of what to do in practice, but I don't use it as the end-all-be-all of what's gonna happen there. Fishing is so diverse, and one or two weeks of different seasonal weather, different things that happen out there, will change the way these fish act -- and they're fish, they're not in the same places every time you go there. You can't just go right to a spot and there they are. To me, what happened yesterday happened yesterday -- it is not what's happening today, let alone a tournament you're watching that happened three or four years ago in the same month. It changes completely, so you kind of have to base everything off the here and now. I try to get information -- it's public information, because we are not allowed to get any kind of private information about a lake. Once they announce the schedule, I can't call you, Tom, and say, hey, I've never fished over here in Louisiana or Florida, what should I do -- I can't do that. I can look at public information on the internet, or watch a TV show, but I cannot call and get information.

Tom Rowland: Do you think that's a respected rule?

Brent Ehrler: Not a bit.

Tom Rowland: I was gonna say, at your level everybody kind of abides by the rules, but that seems like a really hard one -- because somebody sees your truck out there, you stop to get something to eat, and they come up and say, hey, you know where you should go is right by the dam, it's always awesome there. And you're like, yeah, I'm not supposed to listen to this -- you're not soliciting that information, but it's being given to you. I would imagine that happens all the time.

Brent Ehrler: It does. And it's like anything in life -- I think the people that play by the rules are usually the ones that aren't doing well. It's unfortunate. You'd like to think that people take the rule seriously, and they don't. I'd say as a whole our group is pretty good about it, but we've got five really, really bad ones that not only get that random information, they're also searching out information, which is against the rules -- and have failed polygraph tests. We get polygraphed at these events, and there's several guys that have failed many polygraphs. And guess what -- they're still out there fishing. So it's unfortunate.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that is unfortunate, because unfortunately there's money involved, and it's a very prestigious thing to be at the top of the bass fishing world -- some people would probably do more for that prestige and reputation than they would even for the money that comes with it, and other people would do it just for the money and don't care about the prestige. So there's all kinds of combinations there. But I always look at a fishing tournament's rules and think, why even have this, when 40% of the people aren't even gonna pay attention to it, 40% think they're abiding by it but somehow they're not, and 20% are really trying to stay within the rules. I always just thought it'd be better for the tournament and the anglers if you made it more of a free-for-all, with the fewest amount of rules possible.

Brent Ehrler: I agree with that. I do, because of the amount of people living in that gray area or getting away with stuff. We look at some of the guys out there right now -- there's a handful of anglers that have failed numerous polygraph tests, and nothing is ever done. So all the leagues are doing is enabling those people that like to live in the gray area, or the black area -- it doesn't matter, they're in that area that's considered cheating, but they don't care because they got away with it multiple times. So what's the point of having those rules if they're not gonna be enforced?

Tom Rowland: I know. And if it's a really difficult rule to enforce, why have them? One of the things I noticed is there were a couple of tournaments recently fishing clear water for smallmouth, using basically what we use in the Keys to look for lobster -- a glass-bottom bucket.

The Flogger: Bass Fishing's Lowest-Tech High-Tech Tool

Brent Ehrler: Yeah, I'm a flogger guy.

Tom Rowland: The flogger -- I'm interested in your opinion of that, because with everything getting more and more high-tech, all of a sudden somebody comes up with the idea that the most low-tech thing that may have ever existed is a super advantage. I'm assuming it's a hundred percent legal, and somebody even came up with a product -- they should sell them in Florida, because that's literally how you use a glass-bottom bucket to look for lobster the same way. So what's the thought about the flogger? I'm a bass fishing fan, but a casual one -- I like it, I respect the guys that do it, I think it's a really tough way to make a living, and the guys who do well at it work really hard. But when I see something like that I'm like, that's new, hadn't seen that -- maybe it's been around for years. What's your opinion on it?

Brent Ehrler: It has been around for a while. To me, it's more specific to smallmouth and spawning -- that's where it truly shines. I have one, I bought one, I felt like I needed it, and I have used it. We had a tournament on the Saint Lawrence River a couple years ago that's got current, and the smallmouth spawn deep. What I used it for is if you see a light spot, or you found it in practice and you have a waypoint there, I'd lean over -- think about doing two hundred burpees while you're fishing -- you lean over the deck, you take that flog, you put it in the water, you're laying on the front deck of the boat looking through this thing, and if I see that smallmouth on that light spot, I stand up, set it off to the side, and cast repeatedly towards that light spot to try and catch it. I know a lot of guys will physically have a rod in one hand, holding the flogger in the other, looking in the water, and when they see the fish bite they set the hook, let go of the flogger, stand up, and reel that fish in. I don't do it that way -- I like to look at them, stand up, and then make that cast. What do I think about it? I think it's very specific, and it's a very small window -- it's not something you're gonna put in your hand and go out and all of a sudden catch more fish. It's very specific to smallmouth and spawning, because they spawn a little bit deeper sometimes, and they are not scared -- when they get on a bed, they'll just sit there, you can get right on top of them, they don't care. You can actually catch them multiple times because they're so aggressive, like a junkyard dog -- they'll just sit there and attack it. So it's such a small little window where it works. If guys wanna use it, I'm fine with it -- you can do it the way I do it, or just look with your eyeballs and see them and catch them that way too.

Forward-Facing Sonar and Reading Fish on the Screen

Tom Rowland: I think it would be funny if that became illegal, because it's like the most basic, primitive kind of first technology that probably ever existed -- that's the first fish finder, right? It'd be funny to see people get up in arms about it being illegal when it's so primitive compared to the twenty thousand dollars' worth of electronics right in front of you. But you can't look in the water for a fish. And really, the electronics today, with active target and all the different animated ones where you can see the fish swimming around -- it's almost like looking in the flogger.

Brent Ehrler: It is, it is. I use Garmin and their Panoptix, and it's so good -- I don't see how we ever fished without it. That's forward-facing sonar, seeing not only the fish but the structure you're casting to. You're just so much more efficient on the water. I've had several tournaments -- probably one or two a year -- where every fish I catch during that tournament, I saw them out there, cast to them, and caught them.

Tom Rowland: When you think back to before you had that technology, fishing the same lake -- what's changed? Do you use different lures, different tactics, or do you just have more confidence that the fish are there? Because you caught fish before you had it, but now you're catching every fish because you have it.

Brent Ehrler: Yeah, you're just so much more efficient now. In the past you'd fish a waypoint -- you mark a waypoint where you had those bites, where you think that school of fish is, and you'll fish and fish and they don't bite, you'll leave and come back and make those same casts and they still don't bite. One time you show up and they're in the exact same spot where you found them; another time you pull up and they're not there, and you start looking around and find out they were only thirty or forty yards away. Now I've had it so specific that I do not cast until I see that fish -- so now I'm actively looking for one, two, or three fish that I can cast to, whereas before you're just blindly casting and you will catch them, you're just more efficient at it now because you can see that actual fish and cast to them. It saves time, and you catch more fish.

Tom Rowland: You can also pretty much see the size of the fish you're looking for, right? In Florida, using the same technology for catching bait -- mullet, pilchards, all kinds of bait fish -- we're seeing permit, tarpon, jack crevalle, snapper, all varying sizes, and we can even make out, well, that's a tarpon right there. A tarpon is one of the easiest fish to mark on this technology because you can see the difference between a shark and a tarpon, or a permit and a jack crevalle, even though those are hard fish to tell apart -- if you're close enough and getting a good mark, you can see the difference. Before, you'd look at the sonar and see a bunch of ropey lines and think, well, that looks like what I'm looking for, and maybe you catch it and that goes into your mind as the mark to look for -- maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. But in your world, do you pull up to a place and say, there just seems to be a lot of little fish here -- are you getting that good with the electronics?

Brent Ehrler: Not really. Every once in a while I can tell if a fish is a little bit bigger, but I can't look at a school of fish and go, well, I'm not gonna cast that, that's only a two-pound fish -- I can't do that. I look at the marks, I throw to the marks, and hopefully I catch them. Every once in a while I feel like one is a little bit bigger than another, and it's almost always the one that doesn't bite -- they follow your bait, act like they're gonna bite, but don't, and I go, man, that was a big one. It's the same thing as when you get a bite, set the hook, and your line breaks -- you go, man, that was a big one, and then you're sitting there retying and hear a twelve-inch fish jumping trying to throw your hook. I can't tell the size on them. Every once in a while I can look at a group of fish and the way they're stacked up, or the way they look, and think, I don't think that's bass -- a lot of times it's a school of catfish or carp. Every once in a while I can tell that, but even then I see fish, I cast to them, and if they don't chase it or follow it, that's when I go, yeah, I don't think those are bass.

Tom Rowland: Maybe the technology isn't good enough yet, but I bet it'll continue to improve, and I bet you'll be able to count the rays on the dorsal fin. It's really incredible when you get a good mark on a tarpon -- you can see the scales, a scale pattern, a fork tail, and you can see the difference between a barracuda and a tarpon a hundred percent, even if they were the same size, because the barracuda tail is kind of squared off and the tarpon tail is very boomerang-shaped on the mark. It's the perfect situation because a lot of times we can clearly see a dark spot where we always catch tarpon, and we know that's a school of tarpon -- you put it forward, look at it, and sure enough it's fifty. Sometimes I'm surprised at how few or how many there are when I can clearly see them with my eyes, but it's just a faint darkness -- you think there's twenty, then you scan them and it's six.

The Technology That Changed Fishing Most

Tom Rowland: One of the interesting questions I've asked a bunch of people, and it's cool to hear the different answers -- what do you think the technology is, electronics, boat technology, anything, that has changed your fishing the most, not just fishing in general but maybe bass fishing in particular? I've gotten so many different kinds of answers on this -- is there a technology you think of that was just truly revolutionary?

Brent Ehrler: There's several things -- they kind of come in waves. I remember I was at a tournament on the West Coast, and a guy shows up with this rocket-launcher-looking thing off the back of his boat. I asked what it was, and he said, that's a shallow water anchor, it's called a Power-Pole. I'm like, well, what is that? And he hits a button, and it extends out and the spike goes in, and he goes, so I can anchor in shallow water with a button. And I'm like, what? He had one of them, and then you start seeing everybody running around with one Power-Pole, and the next thing you know everyone's got two, because if you have one you're only a pivot point, and if you have two you're locked into place. So Power-Pole changed the industry with a shallow water anchor -- to me that was a huge advantage in fishing. Now, granted, it's shallow water fishing -- you have to be in less than eight feet of water for those things to reach down and stick on the bottom, though they make bigger, taller ones. I run eight-foot blades, and if I'm in less than eight feet of water I can stick in place -- I have the two, and to me it's mandatory to have that. So Power-Pole had a huge advancement in that shallow water anchor market. Then Garmin came out with their Panoptix -- I think when it first came out they called it something different, and I wasn't using their products back then, but I can't imagine not having Panoptix right now. Just the efficiency of seeing targets to cast to, whether it's structure or grass edges -- grass comes out to a point, you can see that point and make your cast specific to that spot, and then physically seeing the fish out there as well. So those two things were a huge advancement in fishing. And then, four-stroke -- Mercury came out with our Pro XS, the four-stroke, and that was a big deal. For a guy like me traveling across the country, I used to have to put fifteen, twenty gallons of oil in my truck that I had to stock through the season, and I'd re-up during the season because every tournament you'd be putting one, two gallons of oil into that reservoir for that two-stroke engine.

Tom Rowland: Even before that, you're mixing.

Brent Ehrler: And mixing -- though I wasn't doing that back in the day myself, I never had to mix the oil with the gas, I got into it later in the game, but I can't imagine doing that. Just think about that advancement -- now I just pour the oil into the reservoir.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that was a big deal, oil-injected motors -- and you got the perfect blend, because you would always have a heavy pour or not enough gas, and it'd run a little lean or a little rich and smoke a bit. But that was a big advantage, just the oil injection, and now the four-stroke is ridiculous.

Brent Ehrler: Think about that. That's where I met you, when we ran to Lake X with Mercury -- they didn't tell us why we were there, we all kind of had an idea, but we hopped in buses and went out to Lake X, and we walked out to the water and they pulled the boat out of a garage on the water and said, here we go, here's our four-stroke Pro XS.

Tom Rowland: That was incredible too, and then they've gone even further -- I did another event like that for the V10s and now the V12, and that's an incredible engine.

Brent Ehrler: Now what are you running on your saltwater setups?

Tom Rowland: Well, we run a lot of different things -- we have a sixteen-foot skiff running a hundred-and-fifteen horsepower, and then we have twenty-four-foot bay boats running either a three-fifty or a four hundred, and the V10 is what we wanna run but don't have yet, so that's coming, but I'll run any Verado that's available and I'm super happy with it. On the bigger boats, either twin four hundreds -- right now we don't have a 36, but at some point we'll have a triple-engine boat. On our show, we go with the twenty-six-foot Yellowfin, and honestly the way Mercury pushes that boat, we feel very confident on a single engine. Most people prefer a twin, but with the weight we save we actually run faster than twin-engine boats. We had a camera boat with twin Yamahas, and we had a single Mercury, and we just dusted them -- they couldn't keep up, we kept turning around like, what's going on, why are y'all slowing down so much, and they're like, dude, we're giving it everything we got. To be fair, they had a couple camera guys in there, a little heavier probably, and those camera guys bring all that food and drinks -- there's an amazing amount of weight from the cameras and the snacks these guys eat all day. I don't know if they do that on the bass side because they can't stop rolling, but when the same guys come work for us they're like, man, this is awesome, we can just eat a sandwich whenever we want, you guys barely catch anything all day, you hardly even fish, we know when you're gonna cast because you say, oh, there's one, so we pick it up and start rolling and never miss anything. But for you guys they have to roll all day because anything could happen.

Brent Ehrler: Oh, man, those camera guys, how they do it is beyond me -- they've got that big camera on their shoulder from start to finish, I don't know how they do it.

Tom Rowland: They never stop -- that's why the bass camera guys are a good find for us, if you've got experience with that we're interested, because those guys have a work ethic, they'll take any kind of boat ride. I tell them, you take the nicest, easiest bass boat ride you've ever had, and this is gonna be way better -- we have nicer, bigger boats, we're not in a hurry, we're not gonna try to break anything, so they usually like going with us. Some of the answers I've gotten on the technology that really changed fishing for somebody -- one guy, one of the best guys in the Keys, said chemically sharpened hooks. I thought that was a really interesting answer -- he said, man, we used to just sharpen these hooks, I remember that, we used to sharpen hooks, and then chemically sharpened hooks came out. A brand-new hook, right out of the box, it wasn't all that sharp, and you'd give it a little extra sharpening, especially fishing for tarpon. Now you pull something right out of your tackle box, even after it's been sitting there for months in the salt water, and it's still so sharp -- that did make a big difference. And then the hook technology got better, the steel seemed to get better, and those hooks were not only sharper but thinner in diameter. All that makes a big difference, and those are things I don't know -- when I was looking for that answer, that's not what I expected, and he went on and on about how much it changed his fishing and how it rarely misses a fish anymore. He used to miss them all the time, and it was the hook.

Brent Ehrler: Yeah, I never thought about that -- when you asked that question, I wasn't really thinking of something as simple as a hook.

Tom Rowland: But you're right about the Power-Pole -- that was born right in our world. John Oliverio was fishing the Redfish tournaments with us, and he'd have these prototypes on the back of his boat -- they were very small at the time. But the thing about those products is that, even though I'm not a great mechanic, I can take that whole thing apart and put it back together -- they can coach me through it on the phone at ten o'clock at night with a flashlight in my teeth, and I can get that thing ready and working. I've only had to do that one time -- it's not like they break down all the time, but if they do, you can replace any part of it. It's amazing, and I think he wanted that from the very beginning -- make it easy.

Trucks, Trailers, and Miles on the Road

Tom Rowland: Before we run out of time, how many miles do you think you put on your truck a year?

Brent Ehrler: Surprisingly, I don't put as many on my truck as the guys that live back east, because think about it -- if a guy lives in Tennessee and has a tournament in Florida, he'll drive from Tennessee to Florida and back, and then the next event might be in North Carolina, so he'll go from Tennessee to North Carolina, back to Tennessee, then Tennessee to Alabama and back -- they're doing that back and forth. For me it's just one to the next, the next, the next, so really I'm only doing about twenty to twenty-five thousand a year -- it's pretty rare for me to get up to twenty-five thousand, but I'd say I'm probably around that twenty-thousand mark a year.

Tom Rowland: That's not bad at all -- I know a fishing guide in Florida who puts a hundred thousand miles on his truck just staying in the state of Florida, fishing all over the place, South Florida, North Florida, East Coast, West Coast, all the time, constantly. I was gonna ask you about the trailer bearings, because have you ever had problems coming across the country?

Brent Ehrler: I have never had a problem with my trailer bearings.

Tom Rowland: What's the secret to that?

Brent Ehrler: I think now they're so much better. When I started traveling fishing cross-country, I was in a Ranger boat -- Ranger builds their own trailers -- and I never had an issue. I also never had a boat where you had to add grease to the trailer, so I didn't have to grease the bearings every trip like people used to do. I've always run that enclosed bearing that Ranger puts on their axles, and no problem -- since '05, my first season fishing back east, I have yet to have a bearing problem.

Tom Rowland: Well, you probably won't -- another innovation that's made a huge difference is the trailer bearings. On the trailer we have, you don't even have to check them for three years, you don't have to do anything.

Brent Ehrler: What helps too is that we're only launching in freshwater, so I'm assuming when you're launching in saltwater it's gotta be a little more of a hassle.

Tom Rowland: It probably is, but water's water. When I first started guiding, it was for trout out in the Rocky Mountains, and you had to change the bearings every summer before you got started, and at the end of the year you'd either change them right then or know you'd change them first thing before you got back on the road -- salt water is definitely worse, but fresh water isn't fun either.

Going Carnivore: The Diet Origin Story

Tom Rowland: So let's talk about your diet real quick -- what are you doing special for your diet?

Brent Ehrler: For me, it really came from listening to Joe Rogan -- he had a guy, Paul Saladino, on, and a couple guys talking about the carnivore diet. What happened to me -- I'm a big mountain biker, and let's go back to my normal routine during a season. During my off-season I would always diet and exercise, go to the gym five, six days a week to get back into shape, and then the season would start and I'd work the entire season getting out of shape, and then the off-season I'd try to get back into shape again -- I constantly had this rotation of getting in shape, getting out of shape, getting in shape, getting out of shape. At the end of the season, this was back two years ago, I was at a tournament, and I crashed on my mountain bike -- I would take a mountain bike with me and ride at every stop. It was the very last tournament of the year -- I rode, I crashed, and jacked myself up. I broke some ribs, collapsed a lung, had this hip problem, and that was in October, so I was out for like ten weeks. I was almost over for ten weeks, and I just turned into a slob, and the season started and I didn't have that off-season to get back into shape. So I started the season in a bad spot -- I just wasn't exercising, it wasn't a good place. So that next season, in May, I finally said, man, I'm gonna jump on this carnivore thing, and I did, and it changed my life. I told myself I was gonna do it for a month -- I was full carnivore for a month, and then after that I started doing meat-based, so I basically eat meat and fruit, and that's it. I'll do honey and coffee, or just honey -- it's actually really good. This is something Paul Saladino did, he puts honey on a steak -- I'll pull a ribeye off the grill, put butter on it, and put honey on it, and, man, it is delicious. So right now I'm meat-based -- I eat fruit and I eat meat, and really that's it, that's all I need to do.

Tom Rowland: If you've stuck with that for a while, what are the results, and what do you feel like when you're eating that way?

Brent Ehrler: Man, it's nuts -- I lost about twenty to twenty-five pounds, and my energy level skyrocketed, though it's kind of normalized now. I was only gonna do it for a month, and I felt so good at the end of the month that I said, I'm gonna do it for another month -- well, I'm about thirteen, fourteen months in now, so I've been doing it for over a year, just because I felt so good on it, I didn't wanna stop. So think about thirteen months -- I haven't had a piece of bread, I haven't had any sugar, granted I have honey, which is a different kind of sugar, same thing with fruit, a different kind of sugar than refined sugar. So I just feel so much better -- my energy level is way up, and I like what it's done to my body. I lost a bunch of weight, and that's a big deal. When I was eating like a slob and not exercising, and then you start exercising and eating like that, it makes a huge difference -- your joint pain goes away. I used to have elbow pain, I had wrist pain, I felt like I was getting arthritis in my fingers from that repetitive movement, and it's all gone away. That was one thing I wanted -- I wanted to lose a little weight, and I wanted my joint pain to go away. When you start eating a meat-based diet, you start decreasing inflammation in your body, and those pains start going away. I have several friends I've told about it who started doing it too, and it takes about ten days, two weeks of straight carnivore, and their pains go away after about ten days to two weeks. I have friends who say, I'll do it for a month, and they've been doing it for several months now, and they say, I just feel so good, my inflammation is down, I've lost weight, I don't have back pain anymore, I don't have shoulder pain -- whatever it is, when you decrease that inflammation, those pains start going away.

Tom Rowland: Sure -- I've been seeing you getting in the ice bath too, that helps a lot, it really, really does. Do you find it's easier to stay on the carnivore or meat-based diet when you're at home or on the road?

Brent Ehrler: It's actually easier on the road for me -- when you're so busy, it helps. When I'm at home and walking around the house, I'm hungry and it's harder to stay on it, but when you meal prep, it's great. I'll cook a couple steaks, cook a bunch of hamburger, and then I can eat off of that if I can't cook. It's so easy to cook that stuff, put it in a container, put it in the fridge, and when you get hungry you pull it out. It's not a calorie-restricted diet, so if I'm hungry, I eat. What's interesting is I've actually started eating less food, because you're more satiated when you're eating the right stuff -- when you're eating the wrong things, like drinks and sugar, it actually increases your appetite and makes you eat more than you normally would. So I feel like I'm eating less now.

Tom Rowland: That's like the protein test some people talk about -- if you're really hungry, could you eat a steak right now? Most people say no, I want some chips, I want this or that, and it's like, well, you can have anything, straight protein, that you want, and you go, I'm really not that hungry. And you're not -- it's a funny thing.

A Day of Eating on the Meat-Based Diet

Tom Rowland: So when you're on the road, practicing for a tournament or actually getting ready for one, what are you taking on the boat -- breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, everything? Because this is a big question people ask -- when people are watching their diet, they're doing great right up until the time they go fishing, and then everybody gets a sub sandwich and that's all that's on the boat, and they fall off the wagon. So a lot of people ask what I take on the boat -- I find those pre-hard-boiled eggs at Publix, and I'll take that bag, you get six eggs right there. But I'm interested to know what you're bringing on the boat for a tournament day, or maybe tournament day's not a good example -- do you eat much on tournament day?

Brent Ehrler: I do a little bit, but I eat less on a tournament day than I do during practice -- when you're on the clock, I end up eating less. But it's basic, it's very simple for me, and I can't stress how important it is to eat this way, and it's very easy to do -- people say it's so hard, but it's not, it's so easy. What I'll do is -- let's say a typical practice day for me, which is where I'm gonna eat more -- I'll start off in the morning with coffee, but I put butter in it, I shake it up in one of those protein shakers, so I have butter coffee, and you're getting the fat, and I'm getting the energy from the caffeine. Then I'll intermittent fast, so I won't eat until anywhere between ten in the morning and noon. I'll do two tablespoons of butter in the coffee -- it's actually pretty good, it sounds gross, but it's good. The day before, I'll cook up two pounds of ground beef and maybe two ribeyes, and I'll eat off that for two days -- I'll take about a pound of ground beef, and after I cook it I put butter and a bunch of salt in there, and a little bit of honey just to get some glucose in there, some carbs, a little sugar for energy. I'll have that ground beef and some cut-up ribeye, so that's all I'll eat that day, plus a little container of fruit, blueberries and an apple. So that day I'll have the butter coffee in the morning, fasting until about noon, and then about three or four times from noon until seven or eight at night -- I try not to eat too late -- I'll eat off that ground beef and ribeye and fruit, and that's all I'll have for the day. There's zero inflammation in there -- the fruit's not gonna inflame your body, the meat's not gonna inflame your body, I'm getting the fat from the meat, I also have butter for some of the fat, and I have a little bit of that sugar from the honey, and that's all I eat.

Blood Work, Cholesterol, and What the Science Shows

Tom Rowland: It's interesting, because there's something called gluconeogenesis, I think, where your body can actually make carbohydrates out of protein -- as you have too much protein to digest, it will convert that into glucose.

Brent Ehrler: I just read about that a day or two ago -- that's fine, yeah.

Tom Rowland: It's fascinating, really, because there are lots of people in the world who don't eat much carbohydrates at all, mostly meat. Have you -- a lot of people might not be familiar with that diet plan -- have you done any blood work since you've done this, or what does that look like for you?

Brent Ehrler: Yeah, and it's funny -- my mom said the same thing, she's a vegetarian, and she freaked out when I told her what I was doing. Her reaction was hilarious -- she thought I was gonna die, and she was so freaked out about my blood work. So I actually did my blood work two weeks into doing this, and since then I've done it four more times -- so I've done five blood works in the last year, which I don't think I'd ever done prior to that. My cholesterol has gone down, my body fat has gone down. I actually did an artery test to see if I had any buildup in my arteries, and the guy told me, my cholesterol is still high, but that's just the way my family is -- we run high. But I've gotten my cholesterol down almost a hundred points, which is a lot when you're talking about cholesterol. I eat red meat, and I eat butter, and I eat eggs every day, and my cholesterol has gone down. It's bad for you when you have that mixed diet, when you're eating refined sugars, carbs from bread and different things, and you're not exercising -- that's where cholesterol is bad. But when you're eating a really clean diet like that, it's different -- so my cholesterol has actually gone down. I eat butter all the time, I eat red meat every single day, and they did a scan on my arteries, and the doctor told me there is no measurable buildup in my arteries. I don't know what it was before, I don't know if it's gone down, but my arteries don't have any plaque buildup.

Tom Rowland: That's not surprising -- I do blood work twice a year, and have for probably the last ten years, and I can look back over the different years and see the different diets I was doing. Occasionally I felt like maybe I'm running a lot and following more of a running-based, higher-carb diet, and that's when my blood work was the worst -- when my blood work was the best is when it's either straight paleo or low-carb, high-meat. Like you, I eat red meat every day, or if not every day, five days a week -- I like fish too, I like to eat fish that we catch, so if I'm not eating red meat I'm trying to eat fish, and a chicken slips in there every now and then. Chicken's got great protein for the fat, if you're watching some of the fat intake -- not calorie-restricted, not fat-restricted, but carbohydrate-restricted, and you really need all the calories you can get from fat because of your activity level, almost like a keto thing. Have you heard of Mark Sisson, Mark's Daily Apple?

Brent Ehrler: I don't -- no, uh-uh.

Tom Rowland: You should maybe check him out -- he's a California guy too, he was an Ironman triathlete, and he's one of the first people to kind of advocate for a meat-based or keto diet for high-level endurance athletes. He's been on Joe Rogan a couple of times, he's a very good interviewer, he does a really good podcast, and he believes that's the key to unlock the next group of world records in all endurance events, because he's like, we've taken the training as far as it can go -- there's not gonna be anything measurably different about the way we're training these athletes, we've tried every possible approach to get to where we are today. The only remaining thing is either anabolic steroids or a diet change -- and if you can get people fat-adapted, and get endurance athletes to buy into that, and you already have the high-level training and the genetics of an elite performer, that's how you're gonna run a sub-two-hour marathon, that's how you're gonna see benchmark times that have never been beaten. That's gonna be the wave of the future, or that's what he thinks anyway. It's interesting to think about. But for your own purpose, and for the audience -- better mental clarity, better energy, weight loss, good blood work -- seems like something somebody might wanna try.

Brent Ehrler: I can't recommend it enough -- it's changed my life. I was gonna do it for a month, and here I am over a year later, still doing it.

Diet, Exercise, and Building Momentum

Tom Rowland: So when you're doing that, and I watch your Instagram, even this morning you said you just finished Murph -- that's a one-mile run, a hundred pull-ups, two hundred push-ups, three hundred squats, and another one-mile run. You need some energy for that. So do you feel like the diet gave you more energy and made you want to work out more, or did the exercise come first and make you want to tighten up the diet, or was it a combination?

Brent Ehrler: It was a combination of both -- that's a great question. Most people tend to diet and exercise at the same time, and I was still riding my bike a lot prior to starting this, and I still started doing that. But what I did mix in with this diet, about the same time as my daily push-ups, was weight training instead of just doing cardio -- riding a bike is more of a cardio workout, and weight training is so beneficial for your body, in fact you lose more weight lifting weights than you do doing your actual cardio. So I was mixing it at the same time, but people said your energy level will go down without any carbs, which I kind of believed was true, but at the same time it didn't seem to make a huge difference to me as far as not having carbs in my diet. My energy level was so strong that I'd just be walking around the house and I'd need to do something -- I needed to go out and jog for a bit, or do something, I started getting kind of antsy from not doing anything. So I think it was a combination of both -- wanting to exercise, and then having the energy to do it. You can take anybody and they'll say, man, I really need to exercise, but I'm kind of tired -- you need that energy level to exercise. The push-ups for me were a huge deal -- I have a buddy out here, a physical therapist, a big weightlifting guy who competed for a long time, and he always said, do push-ups every day. I never did it, never did it, and then when I started this I started doing push-ups every day, and it was funny because I'd do thirty push-ups on the first set, and then the next set I'd get to twenty-five and struggle, and the next one I'd get to fifteen and couldn't even finish. And so now I do five sets of forty -- that's what I do, basically every day. I've slacked a few times here and there when I have to get up at five and be on a plane at six, I'll skip that day, but push-ups have just helped a ton. It's a full-body exercise -- you're doing your shoulders, your back, your arms, everything. It's just a great way to get your day started.

Push-Ups, ICAST, and Closing Thoughts

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's fantastic. Okay, so two things -- at ICAST I have morning workouts, I hope you'll come, we'll definitely do push-ups. I'll text you where and when. And then we have the ten-thousand push-up challenge every February.

Brent Ehrler: Oh, man, yeah, let's do it.

Tom Rowland: Ten thousand push-ups -- really, you're already at two hundred, so you'd add a hundred and thirty a day or something like that to what you're currently doing, and you'd be surprised, it's one of those things where the diet helps you build momentum on the exercise, or vice versa -- you build this momentum, and then you're like, well, I did three hundred yesterday, I'm gonna do five hundred today, and it's like, oh, I thought I'd be way more sore -- let's try seven hundred, let's try whatever, and then it's like, let's try to get this thing over as fast as possible. That's what I like to do.

Brent Ehrler: I do enjoy it too -- I was talking to my father-in-law yesterday, he's fit, he's in great shape, and I was telling him about your dad and the push-up challenge, and he told me, he goes, oh, man, I for a while there a couple years ago was doing three hundred a day, and I said, you should meet my buddy Tom's dad.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, man, he's eighty-five, he does a ten-thousand push-up challenge every year. His push-ups are getting slightly shorter in range, but listen, he's eighty-five, dude. I tell him, listen, the best thing you're doing at your age is getting on the ground and getting back up -- the fact that you're doing push-ups is all gravy, but really, there's a significant amount of research that says your ability to get on the ground and get back up has a direct correlation to the length and quality of your life.

Brent Ehrler: I have heard that, and the other thing is grip strength.

Tom Rowland: That's part of it as well -- did you read that book, Outlive, by Peter Attia?

Brent Ehrler: No.

Tom Rowland: Because he's all about that -- you'll love it, and you'll drive maybe to Kansas on that book alone from California, it's a long book, but Peter Attia is a great writer, a very smart guy.

Brent Ehrler: That's where I heard the grip strength thing.

Tom Rowland: Exactly -- he's got this correlation between grip strength and the length and quality of life, and he has this thing he calls the Centenarian Olympics, all these things where if you wanna be able to do them at eighty or a hundred years old -- he winds it back and says, if you wanna be able to play with your grandchildren and get down on the ground at eighty years old, at forty years old you need to be able to do a hundred burpees in eight minutes or something like that, because you're gonna start to lose it as you get older. So to be able to get down on the ground and get back up at eighty, you have to be in much better shape than you are now. It's a very interesting book, I really liked it. But I think we're running out of time here -- I really enjoyed having you on, man, and I look forward to seeing you at ICAST. We'll be at the Mercury, Power-Pole, Daiwa booth -- I don't know, we probably have other sponsors in common too, but I'd love to have you come to the workout, it happens early in the morning right across the street from the convention center usually, and you'll be staying right at one of the hotels there?

Brent Ehrler: Yep, I'll be staying on the road.

Tom Rowland: Cool -- alright, well I'll text you where we're gonna meet, and hopefully you can come one day or all of them.

Brent Ehrler: Oh, man, I'm looking forward to it.

Tom Rowland: Okay, Brent, thanks, man. And if people wanna follow you, see how you're doing on the tour, go to your website or social media -- what do they do?

Brent Ehrler: Instagram and Facebook, I'm more active on those -- it's just Brent Ehrler Fishing, last name is E-H-R-L-E-R, Fishing. So Brent Ehrler Fishing, and I post almost daily, so I try to keep up. And if anyone wants to reach out, I try to keep up with private messages as well, so if you have a question, fishing-related or anything, just shoot me a private message and I'll try my best to respond.

Tom Rowland: You're gonna have more diet-related questions?

Brent Ehrler: Yeah, yeah, diet-related.

Tom Rowland: Alright, Brent, we'll see you next week at ICAST. Thanks again for coming on, man, it was great.

Brent Ehrler: Thank you so much, I appreciate it. I'm glad we finally did this.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, thank you. Alright, see you.