Sarley: A great chance to learn about fishing from a local expert

If I am not fishing, I love to be listening to great fishermen talk about fishing. I do like this time of year because the fishing shows are headed to town. I love sitting in the crowd and listening to great anglers giving tips and telling tales.

Fishing shows like the big expo at the Schaumburg Convention Center aren’t the only places you can go to get your fill of fishing education. One of my favorite things to do is to go to a local fishing club and listen to an excellent presentation.

Let me give you a place and date that you ought to put on your bucket list. The end of the year meeting of Walleyes Unlimited will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday. It’s at the American Legion Post 771, located at 749 Milwaukee Ave., Gurnee.

The speaker at this meeting will be the one-and-only Billy Heim from the Nightprowler Guide Service.

Getting good information from a speaker is a given for me. Being entertained while learning is a bonus, for sure. I love listening to Heim give a lecture. He is absolutely entertaining.

You’d think that somebody who spends seven days a week fishing would get tired of doing it, let alone talking about it. Heim never loses his passion for the sport. He talks and imparts an excitement like no other speaker I know.

I was in a boat with Bob Clark on Lake Geneva when we pulled up next to Heim. As always, Heim was ready to give us some tips and help us out with a couple of his secrets.

He started talking and explaining a way that we could catch some nice smallmouth bass. He started pacing back and forth while he talked. He kept getting more excited as he talked. I yelled over to him, “Calm down, Billy. I think you are going to jump out of your boat.” I wasn’t kidding. That’s how excited he was getting.

Heim is a marvelous guide. He works out of a pontoon boat, which is the ideal rig for teaching as well as catching fish. He works non-stop. The “Nightprowler” name comes from his mastery at night fishing, but he books trips almost on a 24-hour basis. He has incredible energy.

He truly is a thinking man’s guide. One time he came up with a method for getting big smallies. He had his clients cast white flukes into shallow baitfish balls. The flukes looked like the minnows. He had his boat sitting deep and pushing the baitfish into the shallows. The smallies followed the baitfish into the shallows. It was like herding cattle. I had never seen anything like it.

Fishing club meetings always have time reserved for questions and answers. A Heim meeting always stretches the curfew, He never wants to stop and he hates to disappoint his followers.

I am sorry that I will not be able to attend this meeting, but I know that you will be glad that you made it. It’s definitely worth your time.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers for being with me for another year. I hope you enjoyed reading my work as much as I did writing it for you. Please enjoy the holidays, and remember to be kind to you neighbors and spread good will to everyone.

• Daily Herald Outdoors columnist Steve Sarley can be reached at sarfishing@yahoo.com.