In less than five years, Tom Huynh has risen from a relative unknown in the fishing industry to the top of the walleye world.
Not bad for a kid who grew up on an Arkansas cattle farm and never owned a boat – or even stepped in one – until 2016. Fast forward to September 2024, when Huynh (aptly pronounced “Win”) won the National Walleye Tour championship on Lake Huron and placed second in the NWT’s Angler of the Year standings for 2024.
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Huynh, 45, who lives in Wolverton, Minnesota, graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead with a degree in computer information systems. He owns two Polished Nail Spas salons in Fargo.
As a walleye pro and fishing educator, Huynh is an authority in the use of Forward Facing Sonar (FFS), technology that allows anglers to scan up to 100 feet from the boat in any direction to see fish, how they’re behaving and, in many cases, what species they are.
Huynh, who last September launched a curriculum-based online course designed to help anglers use FFS technology, will give a series of one-hour seminars on “Mastering Forward Facing Sonar” during the set for March 6-9 at the Fargodome.
He recently talked with Herald outdoors writer Brad Dokken about the coincidence that led him from Arkansas to the Red River Valley, his rise up the fishing industry ranks and Forward Facing Sonar. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.
BD: You have one of the more fascinating stories in terms of your road to becoming a professional fisherman. Growing up on an Arkansas cattle farm, did you aspire to become a professional angler?
TH: When I was a kid, we only had a couple channels on the TV down there. Bass fishing was on one of the channels we got on weekend mornings. I don’t know if I really aspired, because it was something that looked really cool, and I loved fishing off the pond banks at home.
And then, growing up all the way through high school, I just fished off the pond banks there, and moved up to Minnesota when I was 19.
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From the time I was 19 until I was in my mid 30s, I didn’t fish unless I went home to visit my mom in Arkansas. And so, after 17-18 years, I was like, “Well, I need to do something for myself.” And I went and bought my first boat, and that was actually the first one I ever set foot into.
So then, the rest was history. I just kind of just fished for fun and put a lot of time into fishing. When I upgraded boats, it came with these new (FFS) electronics that just came out, and I just focused on learning them. I didn’t realize at the time that I was probably the first to utilize this new technology the way it’s being used today.
BD: How did the road lead you to western Minnesota?
TH: Well, it's kind of crazy. I made a mistake on my ACT test in high school in Arkansas, and in the beginning of the ACT test when you’re registering, you can put three colleges down that you’re interested in for ACT to send your scores to, and those colleges are dictated by a five- or six-digit numerical code. And I put University of Arkansas, University of Central Arkansas and Arkansas State, but I transposed some numbers in there somewhere, and my scores got sent to Moorhead State, and they were the only ones who ended up offering me a scholarship to have everything paid.
We didn’t have any money when I was growing up. When I say cattle farm, it was like a few acres with a few cattle that my grandpa started when he was a young man, and my mom kept them just to sell them here and there to pay the bills. I’d never been up here before, and if I was going to go to college, this is where I had to go. And I ended up coming up here and staying.
BD: Had you ever fished walleyes? I know there are a few places in Arkansas that have them, but I would imagine the walleye was kind of a foreign species to you.
TH: There’s walleyes in Arkansas, for sure – I know that now – but when I lived down there, I didn’t even know what a walleye was.
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BD: Do you remember catching your first walleye?
TH: I do, it was by mistake. I was fishing for bass up here, and it bit one of my artificial baits, and I was thinking, “Huh, that’s interesting.” But that’s also what helped me when I did start fishing walleye tournaments, is the fact that I could see how walleyes reacted to bass bait. So then I was able to do really well right in the beginning of my tournament career by throwing baits up here that people traditionally didn’t, and that helped me also to do pretty well.
BD: Tell me about your first walleye tournament – an AIM (Anglers Insight Marketing) tournament on Leech Lake – in 2020.
TH: Me and my buddy Nate (Wolske) knew going into it that we’re just going to get beat, but we didn't care, because nobody knew who we were anyway. And so, it ended up we won, and then we had to continue, just to see if we were on to something with these electronics. And to be 100% honest, we went in there thinking we were going to finish in last place. But we won that, and then picked up another tournament in that same circuit and got a fourth-place (finish).
There was one more tournament in September that year on Cass Lake in Minnesota on a bigger circuit called the Masters Walleye Circuit, and we fished that. It was our first two-day tournament, and it was the first live weigh-in stage tournament, and we won that, as well, and set the lake record at that time. That’s what put me on the full-time path.
BD: Were a lot of those early tournament wins fishing shallow weed patterns like bass?
TH: It was both, actually. One of our national championships was on Lake Miltona in 2022, I think – 2023, something like that. I’d have to go back and look, but we caught around 80 pounds of walleyes in two days with 10 fish. And we caught them under people’s docks in like 2 feet of water or less.
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Also, (Nate) and I were the first ones to stumble on the open water bite where walleyes just go out and suspend over deep water. You’ll be in 30 feet of water, and they’ll be suspended 4 feet down, 5 feet down. Where everybody else was passing up these marks, Nate and I secretly knew for two or three years that those were the walleyes you want to catch – those are the biggest ones in the system.
We learned where the big ones stay, where they live during these times of year, and we just knew we weren’t going to catch very many fish, but the ones we were going to catch were going to be big.
The technology helped us not just find them and catch them, but learn their behavior.
BD: There has been a lot of discussion about how effective this technology can be and its potential impact on the resource. What responsibility do anglers have if they have FFS and know how to use it?
TH: We have all the responsibility, if we are not teaching our kids and grandkids to be responsible and utilize the resource the way it should be.
It’s not the technology that’s creating an issue – it’s us. The thing is, though, for the past few years, doing this and learning it and watching other people learn it, I think we're keeping less fish now than we were before.
Some say it’s cheating or that it’s not fishing, but it’s not easy – it’s just putting time on the water.
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Every time a new fishing technology comes out, there’s a group of people who think it should be banned, and I don’t see it happening.
BD: How has your life changed as a result of your tournament success? Is it hard to balance tournament fishing with your salon businesses?
TH: No, it’s not – not anymore. My crew at the salons in Fargo are amazing. Every single one of them are just … it’s a dream to have a crew like that, and I have a few of them that have been with me for over 15 years. So they run everything. I am fortunate that I really don't have to deal with it too much right now, and so I can focus on the challenge of making a living fishing.
BD: Tell me more about Tom Huynh University, and what you offer for people who take the course.
TH: We have this curriculum-based platform (launched in September 2024) that teaches Forward Facing Sonar, that teaches some tournament mentality-type stuff. It teaches the installation of (FFS) in a way that people can understand so it’s just easy, straightforward and right to the point.
It’s broken down into eight modules, and under each module are individual lessons. One module is my interpreting Forward Facing Sonar that has 70 some video clips in there. And they’re not just video clips of a silent screen; it’s the screen that I’m looking at in my boat, with me inset into that screen, explaining play by play what people are actually looking at, so they don’t have to guess.
BD: Will your seminars coming up at the sports show, “Mastering Forward Facing Sonar,” be more of an introductory presentation?
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TH: I’m showing people how to be confident with their settings, first of all, and then I go through and pick certain clips from the university. If we went through the whole university, it’d be hours and hours and hours, but in those one-hour seminars, I go through and pick certain ones that the people who attend can go and benefit from right away. And just showing people, too, that this technology isn’t just about catching fish. I show them how to actually identify different species of fish using the sonar, and how to read these returns to know if it’s a sucker or catfish or northern or muskie.
BD: In terms of walleye fisheries in Minnesota and North Dakota, do you have any favorites?
TH: Actually, Leech Lake is one of my favorites, just because that’s where I really spent the time and dialed in this technology and just kind of went around and cast at everything that I saw on my electronics to see if it was a weed, a rock (or) a fish. That’s the lake I think that I have to say is probably my favorite.
If I’m going for big fish, Lake of the Woods.
BD: You mentioned earlier that you kind of flew under the radar when you started tournament fishing. You’re on the radar now, aren’t you?
TH: Yeah, and it’s still weird to think that. I’d go to a trade show or the Bassmaster Classic just to attend it, and I’d see somebody that I watched on TV or YouTube or whatever, and I was always a little intimidated to go up and say hi, or a lot of times, I wouldn't.
And now, when I am at a trade show, I see people kind of lingering in the background, and I'm like, “I was that person!” And for me to be that guy now, it’s just crazy. I am so thankful … my parents, my grandparents, everybody did right with me. So I can’t take the credit, I’m just doing what I think I’m supposed to be doing.
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