by Mackensy Lunsford

Even the terms to describe women who fish can seem awkward. “Fisherwoman” just doesn’t roll off the tongue like “fisherman,” nor does the clunky “fisherperson.” However you describe them, though, the number of women anglers is growing, as is their clout in the fishing world. Four years ago, the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society rolled out the Women’s Bassmaster Tour, a women’s version of the Bassmaster Classic—an annual fishing tournament that’s something of a Super Bowl of fishing and keeps American men glued to their TV sets for three days in February. Last fall, Kim Bain, a 28-year-old Australian who lives in Alabaster, Alabama, won the Women’s Bassmaster Tour and a chance to fish the 2009 Bassmaster Classic, the first time a woman had fished the tournament in its 39-year history. 

Heather Broom, a professional bass fisherwoman who lives in Sylva, North Carolina, always feels a bit nostalgic about the Bassmaster Classic. Enthralled with fishing at a young age, the soft-spoken 35-year-old remembers tagging along with her family to her first Bassmaster, and with her dad on all sorts of fishing-related trips. “I remember one or two ladies walking around with jerseys on who fished,” she says. “I never said, ‘I think I can be a professional angler,’ because all I saw was men. It’s a man’s world. It was probably only four or five years ago that I realized that there were other women out there competing, [and I said] maybe I’ve got a shot at this.”

Broom grew up fishing but never competed, focusing instead on raising two daughters, Madison and Payton, and on her career as a unit secretary at Harris Regional Hospital. But two years ago, after taking first place at a couples fishing tournament on Upstate South Carolina’s Lake Keowee with her husband Steven, Broom decided to strike out on her own. She joined the 2008 Women’s Bassmaster Tour, finishing 63rd. This year, at the opening tour event in Alabama in March, she placed 20^th and took home $677. One of the highlights of her career so far has been landing sponsors—like Dora, Alabama-based Vicious Fishing, who named her to their “elite” team earlier this year and whose gear she uses on the Bassmaster Tour. As with other women’s pro sports, the sponsorship dollars and prize money for women is relatively puny—top prize for the Women’s Bassmaster Tour this year is $1,000 plus a $55,000 boat, compared to a $500,000 cash prize for the men’s tournament. But Broom finds it interesting that, now that the women’s tour is broadcast on ESPN and rounds up sponsors like Toyota and Yamaha, women’s fishing has a bit more cachet. “Women are becoming marketing tools,” she says. 

For Broom, being a pro angler is more about toughness and grit than looking pretty holding a pole. There aren’t many women whose idea of a fun weekend is to load up a 20-foot boat, haul it to Texas, put it in the water and fish out of it. “It takes a lot of practice, and a lot of guts,” Broom says. And while you might think that a woman’s fishing style would differ from a man’s, the life of a touring pro angler is hectic no matter what gender. During a tournament, women are often on the water at 4:30am, waiting for daylight and the signal to start fishing, which lasts well into the afternoon. “We fish in all conditions,” she says, “tornado, snow, wind, you name it. You fend for yourself until you have to come in.” There’s no bobbing in quaint little fishing rigs, either. Most boats are equipped with 225- to 250-horsepower motors and GPS systems, and competitors speed around trying to scramble for the best fishing holes. “We’re running,” she says. “It’s a race.”

Though the female pro fishing circuit is a tight community, the women are still prone to tell, well, fish tales—stories that leave out competitive details but, in the end, involve catching huge lunkers. “You don’t tell your secrets,” Broom says. “You don’t tell you’re getting a big bite, what you’re catching them with, what lure you’re using. There are tricks of the trade.” Broom, a petite blonde, has the air of a gunslinger when she talks about being on the water, racing against 80 women to the best spot on the lake. “When it comes to me, you and that fish out there, you better beat me to my hole,” she says. “The ladies I compete against are the best of the best.”

If a bass fisher is a gunslinger, all horsepower and machismo, fly fishers are often the thoughtful peacemakers, yin to bass fishing’s yang. Indeed, in speaking with Starr Nolan, owner of Brookside Guides fly fishing service in Asheville, “Zen” is a word that pops up fairly frequently. Nolan, a 55-year-old Greenville, South Carolina native, has been fishing since age eight. But it wasn‘t until she watched a friend haul in a gargantuan silver tarpon on the salty waters of the Florida Keys that she decided to try fly fishing. She was intrigued by the way the fish leapt in the air the moment it spotted the fly, and she liked the idea of fishing with non-barbed hooks. For Nolan, the thrill of fishing is not in catching the fish but in what happens before and after. “Figuring out the water, what the fish are doing…the moment when you get it all to come together, whether it’s a trout or a tarpon. You have to make that perfect cast and be ready,” she says.

Though fly fishing still tends to be male-dominated, linked forever in the public’s mind to the 1992 Robert Redford movie A River Runs Through It, starring Brad Pitt, Nolan thinks women are actually better suited to the sport. “Men tend to have this pre-programmed ‘body memory,’” she says. “They played something like football, where the harder you throw the ball, the harder it goes down the field. That’s not how fly fishing works. It’s about finesse. It’s about being willing to listen and change some things you might have in your head.” Nolan also believes women tend to be better at the detail-oriented business of tying small intricate flies. 

For the past eight years, Nolan has spent her spare time volunteering for Casting for Recovery, a national nonprofit that offers free three-day fishing retreats to breast cancer survivors. Participants in the program are usually tentative when they first join, but once they’re out on the water fishing, “it changes them,” Nolan says. “They realize that they actually can do this, they can accomplish it. I think that for a lot of women, that’s a really big deal for their self esteem.” 

These days, Nolan’s guide business is booming, thanks in part to a book published last year, Time Is a River, by Mary Alice Monroe. A character in the book, Mia, goes through a similar program to Casting for Recovery, using fly fishing trips in North Carolina as a way to heal after a bout with breast cancer. Nolan, who is mentioned in the book’s acknowledgements and who helped Monroe edit some fly fishing passages, says several women have called her because they read the book and were looking for a similar experience. 

She’s happy to oblige, leading groups of women along the clear fresh waters of the Appalachians and Smoky Mountains. Nolan’s favorite stretches of water are the high-elevation streams in the Smokies, where she fishes for the elusive native brook trout. Wading with clients in renowned fly fishing waters like the North Mills and Davidson Rivers, she dispenses her own brand of fishing wisdom—namely, that fishing, and particularly fly fishing, is an opportunity to learn something. “You’re a student of the water and of the fish, of their habits and of nature…it really is a Zen experience to just be there and be a part of what’s going on.”  

To learn more about Casting for Recovery, visit www.castingforrecovery.org. To learn more about Brookside Guides, visit www.brooksideguides.com or call 828-215-4234. To contact Heather Broom about sponsorships, email her at hpbroom@yahoo.com or call 828-508-8091.