 Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for North Central Minnesota, produced by Lakeland Public Television with host Ray Gildow. Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for information available at BemidjiAirport.org. Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Niswatak Service, tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at Niswataks.com. Hello again everyone and welcome to Lakeland Currents, where tonight I'm having a unique opportunity to fish with an old friend talking about one of my favorite topics, fishing. But it's going to be a little bit of a unique show and that we're going to go back and talk about fishing in the early days of technology and all the changes that we've seen in our lifetime and some of the changes and some of the things that we're seeing on our lakes now and how fishing is currently so different than it was in the 60s, in the 70s. And my guest this evening is Dave Sanda, who has got an unbelievable background in this. And I found out today is something I didn't know. He's a trained engineer, so we'll have to ask him why he got into engineering, which has nothing to do with the profession that he went into finally. Dave, welcome to the show. I know you were on the show with us when we were doing The Fishing Opener, where the governor a couple years ago, and I'm glad to see you got my alma mater's shirt on, the University of Minnesota. I can't claim to be a U of M graduate. No, I know, you're a Chicago boy. I actually graduated Illinois, but I have a granddaughter at the University of Illinois. So you graduated from the University of Illinois? Yep. Very cool. So at least a big 10 person. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, tell us a little bit about your formal training background before we get into the fishing. And where you grew up? Well, I grew up in Chicago, and I spent time with a lot of the fishing clubs in that Chicago-Rockford-Milwaukee area, which was a real hotbed of fishing education back when I was in high school and in early college years. And then after I graduated, I moved to Milwaukee for a couple years and really got involved in the fishing clubs. And I worked there for about three years as an engineer, as we mentioned. And then I had a call from the Linder Brothers and wondered if I wanted to come up and work at- Did you ever hear of them? Yeah, they were there from Chicago. Actually, they grew up on the same street as my dad and went to the same high school. No kidding. They got two blocks apart, so small world. Wow. When I first came to Brainerd, I told them this one guy, it's all the good fishermen are from Chicago. They didn't appreciate it. But anyway, they mentioned you want to come up and I thought about it for about 10 seconds and then I was gone. I packed my bags and they could offer no security and no money at the time, but we could fish every day. And the Brainerd area was just alive with fish compared to what I had seen in the Chicago area where there's a lot of heavy fishing pressure. So it was just amazing to come up here and been here ever since, pretty close in on 40 years now. So if you look at the early years of what I call that educational evolution in fishing, the Lenders were certainly at the forefront of that. As were you because you were working with those people back then. But you're talking about fishing clubs in Chicago and Milwaukee. That was kind of the hotspot of new things at that era. And what years are we talking about roughly? Oh, in the late 60s and then all through the 70s and into the 80s. You know, that's when Fishing Facts magazine was around. Bill Binkleman was and started that and it was the hub of fishing information and it certainly expanded out for people who might not know who was Bill Binkleman. Oh, he did the original Nightcrawler Secrets books. Talked about fishing little finesse techniques, very, very light line and teasing fish. Bill was a real great communicator in that he was the first place to popularize a combination of big events. One was Buck Perry's introduction of structure fishing concepts in the late 50s and into the 60s along with Carl Lorenz's introduction of the depth finder, the fish locator. And those two things together gave people an understanding of the underwater world and their eyes to the bottom because they could see how deep it was. They could see weed. Sometimes they'd see fish. And we went from being people who just wondered and tried to imagine what might be beneath the surface to really kind of understanding what actually took place down there, the kind of underwater habitat that fish had. And it just revolutionized fishing amazingly. And I do think of those as the golden years when we went from just guessing to really learning and understanding and in many cases knowing what's going on down there. Do you think at the time that any of you realized the impact that you would have later when you started doing videos and publications, did you see that coming or did we knew that we were helping thousands of people learn to fish better and to appreciate the sport and help them progress. As we ourselves learn things and progress, we learn new things all the time. But I don't think anybody ever saw the fact that it would be millions and millions of people, especially with the advent of all of the TV shows that came on later on and then the internet nowadays. We reach out and have touched countless millions. And that's a very satisfying thing for me knowing that I helped a lot of people over the years to catch more and bigger fish and enjoy the sport. To me that's the most important thing. So when you came to Brainerd, had the lenders started the In Fisherman magazine at that time? Yeah, they were about a year and a half or two years into it. So it was really an expectancy. And so when you came, you started your work as an editor. And you still are in what you're doing today and we'll talk about that a little later, an editor for the writing side of things. That was always my primary job. But you became an online personality as well. I got to be a TV star. And that was not something I originally had intended, but I worked at In Fisherman for 28 and a half years and then jumped over to Linder Media for another 10 and a half. And that was all very heavily television oriented. So you had almost 40 years with the lenders and the Linder family has changed of course a lot since that day. Because I know when Ron moved here, I think he had six kids. And some of those boys are still involved in the Linder Media productions. Did you know Carl Orance? Did you ever get to meet him? I met Carl a couple of times, yeah. I have to tell a great story about Ron because we're telling stories here today a little bit. That's what happens when you get old guys to come. I know, I know. We just don't have the coffee before us. So Ron, and I wrote this in my book on the Niswa Guides League, Ron got to take Carl Orance up to the Whitefish Chain. And he was going to go up there and show them how to catch walleyes. And if you're not familiar with the Whitefish Chain, there are 14 lakes connected to it. So it's a fairly good body of water when you start jumping around and going into these different lakes. And so they were fishing for quite a while, I think an afternoon. And as the day goes along, moving all around and moving all around, Ron finally had to tell Carl, I have no idea where we're at. He couldn't remember where he brought his boat in. And he couldn't remember how to get him home. So that was a great time because Carl Orance used to come up and fish with the Niswa Guides. And he came up and he was in the grocery business. And he had a supermarkets that he worked with. And he was doing electronics on the side. And so he invented, I'm not sure what the color of the box was, if it was a red box. It started as a red one for a little while and then it became the green box. The green box. And so he would come up with Jim Wentworth, who along with Marv Kep had fish electronics. And get technical advice from Jim because Jim is a pretty sharp guy in electronics on how to make these boxes work better. And there's just some great stories about that era. But nobody ever heard of Carl Orance. Not people from around here probably never heard of Bill Binkelman. Those weren't big names here like they were in the Chicago Milwaukee area in those early years. Of course, after the publication started coming out, people started recognizing these were just absolute pioneers in the world of fishing. It was the educational aspect that spread all of this information out to everybody and made it widely available. And the thing is, and I think even with yourself, all of you people in this industry had a real passion to fish, didn't you? I mean, you really loved to fish. And that's why if you look back at what, I can't remember now what Ron and El were making as guides, I think it was like $12 for a half day trip. The money was not good. Nobody ever did this for the money in early years, did they? Well, that kind of describes the fishing industry. So even today, doesn't it? We got into it because we loved it. Yeah, and the fishing industry, it changed a lot in that era, but it continues to go through massive changes. We can maybe talk about that a little bit as we get into the program. But I just think that the neat thing is that so many of these people spent so much of their time working for practically nothing just because they loved what they were doing. Well, and they put a lot of time and energy and put their heart into it and it paid off. At one time at the peak, do you have any recollection of how many employees were within fishermen? Between what we did in Brainerd and our camp fish operation, it was 55. 55 employees. Wow, that's a lot of people. Yeah, and that's much smaller nowadays. Right, and the magazine industry has changed so drastically. As has television, there weren't a Pursuit channel or the Outdoor channel or the Sportsman channel. No, you had some broadcast channels in. So you had to compete to get on to television. There wasn't that much space available and advertisers would flock to you because you had a good show and they were competing to have your spots. Nowadays, with so many shows spread across so many different networks, it's hard to get them all sponsored. It's hard to find sponsors for all that. And that actually is a driving force in being able to field a TV show. Right, and I think the technology for cameras has changed so much. It used to be people had to have really professional level cameras, what we would call professional level cameras to even do a TV show. And now, my gosh, you can go down to Best Buy and buy cameras with broadcast quality pictures and sound. And there's many, many more people making outdoor, not just fishing, but hunting and skiing and all kinds of outdoor events with a lot lower budget than what you guys do. Yeah, you certainly have the technology that you can go out and do that. The trick is coming up with a nice cohesive show that takes you from A to Z and helps you learn something and entertains you in the process and then fulfills a good atmosphere for the advertiser to be involved in. So when you first started fishing, what were you using for boats and motors? Oh, we had a combination of things. You know, we all started with old 315 Lunds way, way back. Shell lakes? Way, way back in the day. And then it went to the Lund Aluminums and that was really the most popular things that we have here in Minnesota that was real popular. We had other boats from time to time, but it always centered back around Lund. And I remember when the first 90 horses came out, Marv kept at the shop and Niswa said, don't buy 90 horsepower motors. You'll scare the customers with those big engines. And now a 90 horse motor is, you see 350 motors hanging on pontoon boats, twin 350s on some. Trendlessly changing. I mean, you went from being a time when you had 10 horses and rental boats to 50 horse motors and trailering around and then all the way up to nowadays you got 250, 300 horse motors on 21 foot boats. And a lot of the guide clientele demands the luxury and the comfort of being in a boat like that. It's not the same as it used to be. Also our fishing tackle has changed so much. I can remember the first skyline graphite rods that came out and they felt like little toys, like a tinker toy. What is this? You know, but very sensitive and then all the graphite rods can continue down from there and revolutionize and everybody went away from fiberglass in almost all instances. The old cherry wood rods that you could whip back and forth about a half a block with those things. And now the $100 rod today is probably what a $500 rod would have been back in the 20s. I mean, 20 years ago I should say that technology is included. And our lines have changed. No, we had monofilment line at the time. Actually, when I started with monofilment, when I was a kid, that was relatively new. And I had some of the first Mitchell spinning reels that came over from France. My dad had one of the first ones and I learned to fish with those, but my grandfather had strictly been using an open face, I mean, a revolving spool casting reel and Dakrod line. And so he had to try to teach him. Whereas I came in with mono and I adapted to it much more easily. And that's an interesting thing. When people come into a sport, our sport, now they tend to think that it's always been this way. We always had fancy electronics. We always had all these different lawyers and lines. It's not the case. So things were a lot simpler, a lot more primitive back in the day. Nowadays, in addition to mono, we have many different kinds of mono formulations. We've got rated super lines. We've got fluorocarbon lines. And we can specialize them to certain applications, just the way we pick our lures for certain applications, different species, different times of the year, different depths. Fishing is really a component thing where you mix and match all your components to come up with an effective combination for the species, for the time of year, the kind of areas and depth that they're in, the kind of cover, their activity levels. This is something you kind of judge when you go out there. You don't always just do the same thing. You have to kind of sense what's going on out there. You use your ESP to kind of figure out what the fish are doing, do some testing, and use zero in on a pattern. It doesn't always just happen where they go out. You go out and they jump in the boat. So do you have a favorite species that you really enjoy fishing above others? What I always say is whatever's biting. Whatever's biting. Yeah, you know, I like to fish for everything. I really do fish more for bass and probably crappies than anything else because they are so available. But I love to fish for everything. They all have their unique challenge and their charm. And like I mentioned to you before we started to show that after many years of doing spring sport show seminars and talking to thousands of people, I would go steelheading in the spring and go stand in the stream and talk to no one. Just to get away from it all. Nice to have a little break. So tell me about some of the seminar experiences you've had. Where did you go in your career when you would do the winter time in spring? Lots in the Midwest from like the Dakotas out to Pennsylvania, even New York and then down a little bit into Ohio. So did you do this with teammates or were you usually on your own? Usually on my own. Sometimes with a couple other people but often on my own. You just get your rod case and some slides. We use slides back then and fly into some destination someplace and go to the sport show and talk fishing with people. And back in that era, 60s and 70s, people were hungry for this information. Very much so. Probably more so than the art today because there's so much more present. So many more ways to get it now. You can get it on your computer. Internet or whatever. It was real common for us to pull a crowd of a thousand people at a seminar. Wow, is that so? You know because they had no other access to information. Nowadays they can dial it up on their computer and they can get good fishing information. And so a lot of the education has trended in that direction. People get their information on their cell phone. Even they can pick up the radar. They can pick up fishing information. You got the map. You can put the map on your phone of the lake that you're fishing. And again, we didn't have any of that in the old days. We had to line up rifle sites to figure out where our spots were out in the lake. Mark spots on the anchor roll. Nowadays you pull up the map and you can see that with underwater structures and drive right to them and it makes it a lot easier. Anglers that are now much more efficient, they have to spend less time hunting for fish and more time fishing for fish, which is a good thing. But the thing is you still got to get them to bite. And they don't always want to bite easily. And so you still have to have some ability to decipher what they're doing, what their activity levels are, and whether you're trying to tease them and tempt them or you're trying to provoke a strike. And the challenge never will end. You'll never go out and easily catch the last fish. Some days they just do not want to cooperate. I've had about three of those cases this fall where they were not cooperating. That's really true. Tell me how you kind of got from doing editing of all the reports and the articles that were being written to on-camera stuff. How did that evolve for you? Well, it started with the lenders when they started their TV show. And they were one of the very first ones to do that, to do half-hour TV specials. And that was the end-fisher. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then again... And how many years did they actually do that? Do you know roughly? Oh, we started in about 78. I think we started filming in 78. So it's been a long time. It's been for 40 years. And they did the facts of the fishing show earlier than that. So they've been in the business for 50 years. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. And we've just seen things have changed tremendously. As you mentioned, the equipment. And now we have little GoPro cameras on the rods on hats and in the boats and get different angles, put it on a stick, look at the fish underwater. There's all different kinds of tricks that you can do. But because people are much more sophisticated and they demand a higher level of the photography and whatever's going on. And that photography, even on those little GoPro's, is absolutely world-class quality, isn't it? Yeah. And you want to make them feel like they're right there in the boat with you. Yeah. That's amazing. And what you still... It's not just a matter of catching fish after fish, you have to have a learning experience. Explain the environment, what's happening, what the fish are doing, how they're relating to their forage, why you're picking this tackle, the depths you're working in, why and how. And so they can learn from it. I know of a similar situation to that. It's not just to go fish Lake X, which the person may be fishing on, they can apply it to a similar body of water where they live. And that way they learn something valuable. And that's the key to making good outdoor TV. And the in-fisherman got into an era of professional tournaments, too. Oh, yeah. And... All-I tournaments. Did you work with that? I spent 10 years on the road working the PWT professional all-I trail. Which was real interesting. It took me all over the country from Lake Erie out to Montana and out in the Dakotas, and down south to some cases, Arkansas. And got to see walleye fishing in so many different environments. We learned together, all of the competitors and us as editorial people, and you learn that there's no such thing as just typical classic walleye behavior anymore, because the walleye's been stopped in a lot of places. And so walleyes up in Brainerd area in natural lakes behave one way. Where Lindy Rig is great. Then you go out to Lake Erie and you're 10 miles offshore for suspended fish. And if you're fishing one line, it's a lonely feeling. It's like being the Maytag repairman out there, okay? But if you have a spread of trolling boards out with four to six lines working different depth levels, now you become more like a shrimp trawler. And you're going, you're covering area. And you're experimenting with the different variables. And that's how to catch fish in that application. And then you may go to a different reservoir where it's deep jigging. Four-back curve somewhere. And so you learn all these different tactics. And Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin, flipping up in the cane beds in three feet of water to catch walleyes. Who would think of doing that? But the local environment dictated that and the fish adapted to it, according to their basic nature. And that's why to be a good consistent angler who travels around, you have to be very versatile, be able to do 10 or 12 different tactics. And you have to be able to recognize what the fish are offering you and you adapt rather than trying to force them to bite your favorite thing. That's really a very valid point, I think, for people who like to angle. Why is it you think that the walleye tournaments have never reached the popularity of the bass tournaments? Well, the bass tournaments started so they were the first thing. They were the kingpins. And they developed a whole cadre of these very famous pros and the advertisers flocked to them and paid them relatively good amounts of money. Okay, by the time it got to be the walleye tournament coming along, they were the second fiddle. They were the second fiddle and the tournaments have never been able to reach that same plateau. Also, bass fishing is far more widespread than walleyes. So I mean, we do understand why. And now I was just talking to my friend Brad Durick about catfish tournaments and that's another level behind the walleyes. It's hard to get a lot of big money sponsors or anything for that because it's just, it's the fish. While a lot of people fish for them, it's not a glory fish like a bass or a walleye. And it's just, it's hard to get the sponsorship levels in there. Okay, and so it's, I don't know, it isn't fair. It isn't fair because the catfish is no more valuable than a bass, as far as I'm concerned, but that's just the way. But bass fishing is really big money, isn't it? I mean, those tournaments are big money. It is. It can be some very big money. But you know what? And it's a good lesson for anybody who wants to get into the business. Very few people are actually paid just to go fishing. The best people are also communicators who do seminars, who do articles, who do television. They go to in-store promotions and they are good spokesmen for their sponsors. And that is way more important than often than for your fishing ability, believe it or not. I think that's such a valid point you make, Dave. I got a call last night from a young student, a guy who was going to college and he wants to be a guide, but he's going to be an anesthesiologist, so he's going to do that on the side. And I told him the same thing. There are very few people in the business at any level. The lenders are the exception and some of those people are the exceptions. The rest of the people need something to pay for the bills. Yeah, absolutely. So you stay in school, you learn to be a communicator, you work on your communication skills, and then you learn fishing and you learn business. You learn how you can work with sponsors. And that's what makes you a success as opposed to being a sterling angler. Because you may be a really great fisherman, but if you fall short on these other avenues, well, you'll never progress to those heights. Really interesting observation. Tell us about your new endeavor. Yeah, I've been working with Midwest Outdoors for the last year or so. And there are eight people, think of them as a regional publication, but they're actually, you pick up a copy, a monthly publication. It's like that thick. It's amazing. And they have eight regional issues that stretch from Ohio over to Dakotas and down to Kentucky, Tennessee. And just the local information is astounding as you go through there. You can't believe how much stuff is in there. And it reminds me of back in the day when we used to do really thick in fishermen. And now they're just, you know, they're not that way. The magazine industry is not that way anymore. But some of these tabloid publications like Midwest Outdoors, they have a good, strong advertising contingent for their region. And it allows them to put way more editorial in there mixed in with the advertising and you get lots of information. And so I've been writing and doing a lot of editing for them for the last year. And they are actually out of the Chicago area, but they stretch again across this very, very wide region, the multi-species region, which we are. We are North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa. They've got hunting, deer hunting. Yeah. So there's something for sportsmen all year long. And I'm way less of a hunter type than I am an angler. But I know enough to be dangerous about the hunting things. But I always find that as I go through the proofread, I learn something. Every issue, I'm learning things about it, which is really amazing. And so if you're looking for good local information, I'd say publication like Midwest Outdoors is very, very good because it keeps you on the pulse of what's happening. So you're an associate editor. So you write. You are also a writer. You write your own articles. And then you do some of the editing for them. Yeah. I do a lot of editing for proofread, which to me, again, I put a real value on that. I mean, we can't just slop articles out there. Even a person's got to be a good writer and communicator. And I can help some people sometimes with some of the things that they're doing. They still come up with the basic ideas. Sometimes I can fine-tune it and make it a little bit more readable and add just to my little experience into there too. So but we need it to be smooth reading. And it has to be easily palatable to people to help them learn. We're running out of time. I wish we could talk. Seems like we've only been doing this for 10 minutes. We've talked a lot about how this aquatic invasive species has changed our lakes. Sometime we're going to have to have you come back when we've got time and talk about that. Because not only has technology changed, now the fish behavior is changing really drastically. Can you just make a quick comment about that? Yeah, what you usually see with the introduction of zebra mussels or something like that, you get a period of three to five or six years where there's a real change. You know, the water will clear. The fertility will drop. The fish behavior will change. The wheat growth will change. And there's a period of adjustment. And when things finally stabilize, it's a new norm. It's not going to be the same as it was 30 years ago. There will be a stability will happen, but it'll be the patterns will be a little bit different. And so just because you could catch fish in a lake 10 years ago doesn't mean you can go out and do the same thing now. If it's got invasive species in there, you have to relearn the new environment because the fish are relearning new environment. And once they adapt, you have to figure out how they adapt, and then you go after them and you catch them. Fascinating. I could talk to you all day, David. Well, thanks for coming on the show. I'll just have to come back sometime. Yeah, you'll have to come back again. My guest this evening has been Dave Sanda, one of the kindest, most knowledgeable people in the fishing industry that I've ever met. You've been watching Lakeland Currents. When we're talking about what you're talking about, I'm Marie Gildow. So long until next time.