Global Fishing through Paul Bourcq’s Lens

You may not know Paul Bourcq’s name, but if you’re a hard core fishing fan you know his work.

That’s the situation I found myself in a few years ago when he suddenly pulled a decrepit boat into my driveway with his team. They were in town to film an episode of MeatEater’s Das Boat, and they needed a place to make some “refinements” to the craft. My house was a convenient solution, especially since our mutual friend Joe Cermele had asked me to run a camera boat on the Potomac the next two days.

In the boat, it quickly became apparent that Paul and I were friends with a lot of the same people and worked for many of the same properties. We may also have shared the same somewhat immature sense of humor. Moreover, he was living my dream life, traveling the globe with some of the greatest anglers in the world to hit premier fisheries. In fact, just a few weeks before I’d drooled over a video he’d shot of fly fishing for queenfish in Dubai, in the shadows of the city’s skyline, not knowing who he was or that I’d meet him shortly thereafter.

Although Paul may not have intended to enter the fishing industry – he previously worked in high-end restaurants and I law enforcement, and is also an accomplished musician – that’s where he is now. It’s not a single role. He creates campaigns for Drift Media Productions and runs the fishing efforts for Black Rifle Coffee Company. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, so all frivolity aside I wanted to corral his thoughts and find out what makes him tick. Here he is, in his own words:

HPFC: It still shocks the hell out of me that we’d never met even though you have your tentacles out over the entire fishing industry. I think that’s because you don’t have a singular title or role. How do you describe your job?

BOURCQ: I would say I am like a utility knife. I can do a bunch of different things – sometimes it’s content, sometimes it’s marketing, sometimes it’s branding. Sometimes it’s all of those things. I think my best asset is the ability to see several chess moves ahead. I’m thinking about the cause and effect of everything and trying to pitch a reasonable plan that will succeed no matter what. That’s what I’m good at, so I always seem to get tagged that I know how to shoot, and know marketing, but he’s also really into fishing. I think it’s that “but” that really helps.

HPFC: You meet so many people in this industry who knew what they wanted to do when they were in the crib, and you came to it pretty late. Do you think that has contributed to your success?

BOURCQ: I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that. I do know that every job I’ve ever had was full of the unknown. Cooking in a fine dining restaurant, you don’t know what’s coming. You’re only as good as you are prepared in your ability to react. Law enforcement is the same thing, you don’t have any ability predict. Even in marketing media, everybody plans, but I think the best are the ones that can react. That’s what doesn’t get talked about. Anybody can write a yearly marketing plan, but how do you react to daily or quarterly problems? People are linear thinkers, and that causes problems for some folks.

I never thought about coming into it late. I was certainly a fan of fishing growing up, bass fishing specifically, but I didn’t have a desire to be a professional bass fisherman. I didn’t plan to become a camera guy so I could be close to professional fishing. It just kind of happened.

HPFC: You came into the industry from the fly fishing side first. That seems remarkably rare to me. You see people come at it from one side or the other – fly or conventional – and they never seem to mix. What can the two sides learn from each other?

BOURCQ: I’ll answer the first part short, with what we call BLUF – bottom line up front. The bottom line is that all angling is built around tactics, mechanics and strategy. You have to have all three of those things. If they’re all sharp, chances are you’re super-good. In the fishing world, you have keyholes that you look through, and some people look through the bass fishing keyhole. Some people look through the fishing in a pond once a year on the Fourth of July keyhole. Some people are offshore billfisherman keyholes. The reality is that when you’re looking through your keyhole, the view of the world of fishing is pretty small. I’m continually shocked by how many people – I won’t name names – like world-beater bass fishermen who love fishing in rivers, love current, have never trout fished.

For the longer story, I grew up super-poor and didn’t really want to be home much, so I fished a little creek by my house for trout and some bream. That was my Atlantic Ocean. That’s what I was into. As time went on, I remember watching professional bass fishing. I couldn’t believe it was a job, but it was trout that was closest to me. It is really hard when you don’t have a car or money and you’re 10 years old and you don’t live near bass, and you don’t have anyone to bring you, to get fluent in bass fishing. You have to take what’s in front of you.

The fly fishing thing got started late for me. I didn’t start until I was 18. I made the US Team three years later. What started that was actually a competition. My friend Gordon Vanderpool said “Hey, you should try this trout fishing competition.” I said, “That sounds super-lame. I’m not interested.” But he said I’d like it. For me, the thing that I was too ashamed to admit as a young guy was that I didn’t know what par was. I listened to all of my friends who went fishing with their dads – my dad died in a car crash before I was born – so I had a little chip on my shoulder as a young guy. I was jealous of these kids who went to Lake Hartwell and caught a bunch of fish. All I thought about was how to be a better angler. I knew that if I just had the opportunity to be around people who knew more about it I knew that would be awesome. That carries through with me to this day. When I was 18 I fished that fly fishing tournament and I came in 2nd, which was not super-interesting to me. The next tournament I came I dead last and I was pissed – there were 25 guys who knew more than I knew and outperformed me. I wanted to know what they knew. It was competitive – not that I wanted to win. I wanted to know that I could get better and process more information and be smarter than the average bear. The only way you can do that is to fish against someone else. Otherwise you’re just a legend in your own mind.

HPFC: I’m jealous of all of the travel you’ve done but you came by it honestly. It sounds like you weren’t a guy who got childhood trips to the Keys for tarpon or to Montana for cutthroats. Do you remember your first international or exotic trip and what the experience felt like to you?

BOURCQ: I was still an active cop when I got asked to be the assistant coach of the US Youth Fly Fishing Team. I had been around a little bit, but this may shock people but cops don’t get paid enough to travel much beyond their hometown, let alone internationally. Then I ended up becoming the head coach and I got sent to France to coach five terrific young anglers, 16 and 17 year old kids. Up until that point I had never gone anywhere that far. I’m originally from New Orleans, so I’d been from Louisiana over through the southeast, but I’d never been anywhere else really, nowhere noteworthy.

I remember being nervous about the process of travel. Nobody is ever worried once you get there – you figure that out. Once you put me on a river with fish, I know that. What keeps people from traveling is all of the uncertainty in between, and the reality is that there’s millions and millions and passenger jets a day. It’s not that hard. It’s ultra-doable. For me, that was the biggest thing from a travel perspective. When you fly into a city center just about anywhere on the planet, they speak English, and the signs are in English. The further you get from the city, the more the chances are you might not have that, but when you land it’s super-easy to navigate. It’s not near as challenging as people think.

HPFC: So what are some of the other most memorable places you’ve visited?

BOURCQ: Oh man. Tanzania – with Jako Lucas I filmed a tigerfish film for the Fly Fishing Film Tour. We captured very large tigerfish in a very remote area of Tanzania eating topwater flies. The Swahili guides captured a poacher – that’s probably a story for another time. Went to Dubai. We were some of the first people to film Dubai on the fly. We captured queenfish and golden trevally. You have Burj Khalifa in the background.

HPFC: It’s fascinating to me that you chose those two as your first examples. One is super-remote and the other is one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the globe. That tells me that there’s great fishing just about everywhere if you do the legwork to find it.

BOURCQ: A memorable trip for me is with my friend Frank Crescitelli, I’ve filmed his TV show for years. I’ve caught stripers right at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and threw topwaters to bluefish in the shadow of the Freedom Tower. For me, I’d never been to New York City. Honestly, I saw New York City 25 times from the water before I ever stepped foot in Manhattan because Frank lives in Staten Island.

I’ve been to Brazil with Blake Chocklett, deep into the Amazon for peacock bass. I’ve been to Canada, Central and South America. On the tournament scene, I’ve been to Slovenia, Slovakia, France, Ireland, Poland, Italy, Portugal and Sweden.

HPFC: What is it like to have to hold the camera as someone is having the fishing experience of a lifetime? As an angler, it has to be hard not to want to drop the camera and pick up a rod.

BOURCQ: Honestly, I am not a greedy camera guy. I am very happy with my job. If I experience something as a fisherman I have a story to tell. If I do my job as a cameraman I can reach hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. I’m very comfortable with my job to represent that place as accurately as I can. A lot of the new camera guys want to fish. Even as a young guy, guiding, I was just happy to be there. It sounds cliché, but it’s true. If I’d take a client down the river and give him a rod and rig up the stuff and tell him where to cast, and then he catches it – I’m still validated. I’m still a part of the process. I was always very happy to run a camera and I found that being fishy helps. I pride myself on rarely missing those eats. I just have a spidey sense because I fish a lot and I’m a nerd. I know when it’s going to go down. When the tide is slack, mid-day, you don’t have to burn seven hours of footage. But if clouds come in and birds start moving and you start seeing bait, you may want to press record. That’s what I’m proud of – when I got the eats. Sometimes that meant sitting behind a camera for 12 hours straight. There’s no way of knowing. You just have to trust your ability and trust your angler’s ability.

HPFC: Do you have a favorite or most memorable species or place?

BOURCQ: There’s so many. I’d have to break it down to fly fishing, conventional, and other categories. From a tournament scene, my first year in France as a coach, we won a couple of team medals and an individual medal. That was exciting to me because everything was so unknown. That’s what I like. I don’t like being comfortable. That’s kind of why I love fly fishing. The unknown of that first year in France was tremendous. I was meeting all of these people and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. But if you’re a competitor you fake it until you make but deep down I had no idea. All I knew was that once we were put in front of trout we’d be fine. The other stuff was crazy.

From a filming perspective, I would say what’s memorable to me – this may sound odd, but you’ll understand this – shooting Das Boat was pretty memorable for me not because it was particularly challenging. Of course there were challenges because you’re dealing with a human and a wild animal. It was simply because that crew, we worked together for 10 years. I had absolute confidence in everybody’s abilities as well as their downfalls. We knew each other so well that we were supremely confident that we’d execute a great end product, no matter what nature or anglers or fish or whatever threw at us. It felt like it was the top of the food chain, where everybody on your team is insanely proficient, and there’s some comfort in that. It was a domestic show so the travel was straightforward, but the team was A+++. Those guys are the best.

One other story that I need to include: When I was asked to go to the Amazon with Blake Chocklett to film him I thought – and this was a screwup on my part – I thought that I knew something about peacock bass. Kind of deep down I thought it was old news. I’d been reading about peacock bass for 20 years. When in fact I got there, I learned that the entire country’s lifeblood is literally and figuratively built around this river, the Amazon. Everything revolves around it. What I ended up experiencing on that trip was the remoteness of it, what Alaska could have been like 200 years ago. I promised myself after that profound experience that I would never assume that because I’d read something or watched a video that I knew about it. If you don’t know the smell of a 1992 Yamaha coming up the Amazon at daylight, or the sound a 200 pound plus tarpon eating, you just haven’t experienced it. We’re all greedy content-grabbers right now. Our attention spans are ultra-short. Don’t assume that just because you’ve watched a video that you know about it. Do yourself a favor and experience it. I told myself I will never do that again. Nothing I ever read or saw prepared me for just how awesome the Amazon is.

HPFC: So given that realization, and the fact that you went from a kid who’d basically been nowhere to a 37 year-old who has been all over the globe, what is still on your list to do?

BOURCQ: I’ve got to be careful not to spot-burn some of my stuff. I am super-interested right now in billfish and that’s really hard to do unless you’re wealthy. I’ve experienced a lot of it. We kind of exposed a really badass blue marlin and white marlin fishery in the Dominican Republic a few years back, but there’s some stuff I’d like to check out billfish-wise. There’s some tarpon stuff that’s still really uncharted, let’s say Caribbean-based tarpon stuff. I think anyone would like to experience Fiji and the Seychelles. I haven’t done that and I know it would be fun. The one thing on my bucket list that I think about more than any other exotic species is wolf fish. Larry Dahlberg was a mentor to me. He kind of pioneered the wolf fish thing in Suriname. Tragically, his guide Caesar died, so the interest in it went away. But when you take a guy like Larry who spent 20 years of his life chasing the biggest, baddest fish on the planet and his opinion is that the wolf fish is the greatest sportfish on the planet, I don’t take those words lightly.

HPFC: Is there some particular items – a camera, a specific piece of clothing, ear plugs, etc. – that goes with you on every trip?

BOURCQ: Sunglasses. Everything I do is visual. I know it sounds really lame, but I don’t have any ritualistic thing. I like to keep a little bit of cash tucked away, not in my wallet, all the time, because you never know when you’ve got to bribe someone or whatever. A couple hundred bucks American will get you out of a lot. A little bit of cash, sunglasses, and a lens wipe, that’s always in my pocket.

HPFC: Given the fact that you have a background in cooking and you’re obviously a foodie, what are some of the most memorable meals you’ve enjoyed in your travels?

BOURCQ: The worst food is in Eastern Europe. It’s terrible. Some of the best food I ever had was in Italy, but the absolute best was in the South of France. We were in a town called Mende. We ate at a place on the river after a practice session and they cooked chicken for us. It was braised in red wine, carrots, onions, basic stuff. The chickens came from the backyard. The wine came from their grapes. The vegetables were grown there. It wasn’t trendy, but that’s how food is supposed to be eaten, made by humans with care. The food tasted like the air smelled. In my early years as a cook, doing the fine dining stuff, we tried to replicate that, but this was truly it. The bread came from the wheat growing at the church next door. That’s it. That’s as good as it gets. You can search as far as you want, but no amount of $500 tasting menus is ever going to get you close to that.

Obviously there are sleeper regions. Once thing that correlates, you know how when you’re eating out of town everyone says to ask where the cops are eating. They probably arrested the guy in the kitchen. It’s kind of a similar thing. Pay attention when you’re traveling. Where do the locals eat? Some of the best meals I’ve ever had were not because of the Michelin Guide. I literally would ask people from that town – I did it in Lisbon, Portugal. I asked a fisherman, unloading the boats on the docks, where I could get the best seafood. This guy delivers seafood as his livelihood to every restaurant in Lisbon, and he told me where to go. He trusted that guy would take what he delivers and does the best with it, and it didn’t show up on any guide or internet search. It was a little tiny shack by the docks and it was tremendous, some of the best seafood I’ve every had. It wasn’t because it was exotic. It was very simple. We had fire-grilled octopus. We had a fish. It wasn’t fancy. It was simple, well-executed, it was perfect.

HPFC: One of the things that we stress on our website is making the most of your remaining casts. I’m 52 and I’m trying to cram as much as I can into my remaining years. You’re 37, which means that you still have a lot of runway in front of you. What are your short- and long-term plans and goals for the future?

BOURCQ: I wish I could tell you that I had a story where I wake up every morning at 5am and drink protein shakes and build my to-do list and write on my vision board, but I don’t. The truth is that I’ve always kind of trusted my ability to adapt. My friends and I have this concept we call “Bourcq-tivity.” What that is, is no matter where I’m traveling or what I’m doing, something always happens that was bad. I’d get a flat tire or something, but what I learned through that was resiliency. Nothing is going to keep me from doing these things. I will change the tire. I will fix the motor. I will get there and get the job completed. That’s always been kind of my deal. I’m not overly religious, but I believe that everything happens for a reason, and I trust that I’m ethical, my moral compass is sound. It will work out in the long run. I’ve been burned a lot. I’ve had a lot of shady people try to get one over. But I think you meet people twice in life, once on the way up and once on the way down. So far, I feel like I’m still on the way up. A lot of those guys who got quick wins are on the way down, so I don’t sweat it.