Dr. Lucas Bradley's Love for Fishing and Fatherhood

He’s Going to need a Bigger Boat

It may feel like an easy cliché to describe Dr. Lucas Bradley’s ascension to the rank of professional angler as a fish taking to water, but in this case, it’s entirely true. Bradley’s only been fishing for about seven years, but once he got his first taste of competition, the neurosurgeon was, well, hooked.

“It just took hold of me really fast,” he said. “My dad fished; he was a commercial fisherman when I was growing up and he came from an outdoors family. My cousins and my uncles all fished and they all hunted but we never really did much of it. I think my dad was kind of concerned that if he got us too interested in hunting and fishing at a young age we’d never pay attention to anything else.”

Whatever Norman Bradley’s hesitancy may have been during his son’s formative years, it obviously had worn off by the time he took Lucas and one of his grandsons out for the fateful excursion a few years back. Yet no one on that trip could have envisioned how all-consuming fishing would become for the good doctor, who went from his first cast to competitive tournaments in record time, least of all Bradley himself.

“The question I’ve asked myself plenty of times is why on earth am I so into this?” he said. “I think most people crave some degree of competition, and I’m definitely one of them. I grew up playing competitive sports and stuff, and you get to a certain age where your body doesn’t allow you to do a lot of those competitive things anymore. But fishing does.

“I think that’s why it’s taken me like it has. I love bringing the fish home, I love catching the fish, but the part that’s taken me from a personal activity to being borderline obsessed is the competition.”

There are a lot of locales where Bradley could have birthed his new pastime and fed his competitive urge, and the greater Mountain Home region ranks with the best of them. Bradley, who was born in Maine and raised in southern Missouri, first experienced The Natural State’s many waterways in earnest while attending medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock after earning his undergrad at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

“I would consider Bull Shoals to be my home lake; other local places that I prefer include Table Rock Lake, Lake of the Ozarks and Grand Lake over in Oklahoma,” he said. “I also really enjoy fishing on the Arkansas River; when I first started bass fishing, that’s where I spent a lot of my time.”

As for the competitive aspect, Bradley favors Bassmaster tourneys, where he’s far more agnostic about location. The 20 or so tourneys he’ll compete in every year have taken him from Arkansas to Texas, South Carolina and other locations, with Florida being a particular favorite.

“South Central Florida, Okeechobee, Kissimmee, are just very unique,” he said. “It’s a little bit different down there. It’s always warm, the fish are always active. If I had to pick a favorite location, it’s probably Florida.”

Fishing tournaments, at their most elemental, pit anglers against each other with the winner determined by the total weight of a specified number of fish caught during the competition window. Bradley mainly fishes draw tournaments which means another angler is “drawn” the night before to be in the boat. The new duo doesn’t combine their catch’s weight, rather, the two competitors — one called a boater and one called a co-angler — compete directly against their counterparts in each twosome.

But unlike other forms of competition, the anglers are also competing against the venue itself and must “read” the lake or river in order to be successful. The ability to decipher shoreline, depth, water conditions and time of day all come only with practice and are what separate the professional angler from the weekend warrior. But as his five-and-a-half years with Baxter Health have proven, neurosurgery has a way of really cutting into a fella’s casting time.

“Competitive fishing is 10 percent physical, 90 percent mental,” he said. “When you’re improving, you’re always improving the mental side of the game. Me personally, I’d say it’s all about preparing and utilizing practice time to my advantage.

“Unfortunately, I don’t get on the water as much as I’d like. On an average week, I’ll probably fish for six hours if I can get out one afternoon on the weekend. That’s not much. For larger tournaments, I try to use a vacation week so I can practice during the week and then fish the tournament on the weekend. But a lot of times, I just have to go out there blind because I have to work all week.”

One might also infer that more time on the water would provide a welcomed respite from the demands of fatherhood, which in his case are considerable — he and his wife recently welcomed their ninth child into the fold. Bradley, 42, said to the contrary, he’s looking forward to the day he can bring more of the brood with him to pass along his love of fishing.

“They all want to go and I’d take ’em all if I could,” he said. “I haven’t gone on the lake by myself with the kids because they were so young. But the boys have now learned how to drive the boat and turn it on and turn it off and have enough knowledge of the lake that I’ve started taking them by myself. I think they’re old enough to take care of themselves if something happened to me.”