I only fished with Billy Westmoreland once, at the St. Lawrence River back in 1979. Yet I still consider him one of my most important and influential mentors. At the time, I was a budding outdoor writer, and he was a bass fishing legend, widely acclaimed as the best smallmouth fisherman in the country. Since that time, we spoke on the phone every now and then, when I would need to pick his brain for a smallmouth bass article. Each time, we would promise each other that we'd get together soon to spend another day on the water, catching smallies.

Now, it's too late. Billy is gone. The last time we spoke, I made a note to call him in September, to see if he was planning to make it up to Chautaqua Lake in the fall, and to set up a day of fishing with him, if he was. But the reminder was to call him in September of 2001, and with all that went on last year, the opportunity slipped through the cracks. Now of course, I wish I had found a way to make it happen then.

Because he retired from competitive fishing in the late 70s and quit his once nationally syndicated television fishing show some 10 years later, he probably hasn't gotten the recognition he deserves from the current generation of bass anglers. But make no mistake about it. He knew more about catching big smallmouth than just about anyone. Westmoreland shared much of his wisdom and opinions about smallmouth bass in a book called "Them Ol' Brown Fish". But he still took more smallmouth secrets with him than most anglers will ever learn. Those of us lucky enough to have spent some time with him, no matter how little, and to have learned from him, are better fishermen for it, and better people for it. If you consider yourself a smallmouth fisherman and haven't read "Them Ol' Brown Fish", your fishing education will never be complete until you do.

Anyway, Billy was the man who made "fly & rind" a household phrase (at least around my house), as well as the man who popularized, if not invented, the Pedigo Spinrite, which as far as I know, was the first tail spinner lure. Billy was responsible too, for introducing me to blade baits. As much as he was identified with the fly & rind, he confided on numerous occasions that he felt the Silver Buddy was the single best smallmouth lure ever conceived.

Billy was no slouch on the largemouth side of the game either. In fact, he was considered by his peers to be one of the best worm fishermen around. Speaking of worms, Billy was the pro responsible for putting the original "JW Ding-A-Ling" -- still my all around favorite plastic worm -- before the eyes of the fishing public. I think I'll take a few of my meager remaining stock out and catch a fish or two on them this weekend in his memory.

Big plastic worms and largemouth aside, Billy's reputation was founded on his smallmouth expertise. In the seventies, you couldn't mention the name Dale Hollow without the name of Billy Westmoreland coming to mind. In recent years, Billy had become rather disillusioned about the future of smallmouth fishing, and the future of his beloved "Hollow". I last spoke to him just about 3 years ago when I interviewed him for an In-Fisherman article. Here is an excerpt from that interview.

BW:

"I really fear that smallmouth fishing will decline, simply because of fishing pressure. It's not the number of anglers. Surveys and license sales tell us that's actually on the decline. But with the television, and the books and magazines and the internet, today's fishermen pretty much know everything about where the smallmouth bass lives and how to catch it. Stuff that only a handful of serious fishermen learned through experience and hard work in the 50s and 60s is freely available to everyone. They don't have a lifetime of passion invested in the sport, and some of them don't have much respect for the resource. More fish are getting caught and beat up. Every meat fishermen has information that used to be hard to come by, and it's hurting the smallmouth fishery.

More BW:

"If the fish and game agencies don't start protecting smallmouth a lot more, the fish will be in trouble. I've seen Dale Hollow come back from just terrible fishing that excessive pressure had left it with. But it came back partly because anglers lost interest when there didn't seem to be any big brown fish being caught anymore. Instead, they went to Pickwick and Wheeler, where you guys were telling them the best fishing for giant smallmouths was right now. But it didn't take too long for those lakes to start feeling the pressure, too. So there's a renewed interest in Dale Hollow, now that it looks to be on the rise again. But when Dale Hollow was at its worst, they put in an 18 inch minimum, and that really helped. The meat fishermen -- at least the ones that care about being legal -- just aren't going to bother with a place that has an 18 inch limit. Protecting those fish till they got that big helped the smallmouth fishing recover. But as soon as it got to the point where you can go out in the spring or early winter and catch and release a good bunch of 3 and 4 pounders, they want to put in a slot limit that will let people to keep all of these little bass. Where are the big ones going to come from, if the small ones are killed?"

Billy was always a shoot from the hip kind of guy, and was never afraid to speak his mind. I'll miss him. The smallies probably won't.