(WGHP) — There was a time when to become a great fisherman, you spent hours on end with an “elder statesman,” of sorts – your father, your grandfather or maybe a favorite uncle or aunt – and absorbed their wisdom about how to find where the fish are.

“That’s the thing with this stuff: you can chase them down. It’s so crazy,” said Paul Reich about the technology he uses to find fish in places like High Rock Lake and Badin Lake.

“This newer technology, I can look out in front of the boat around me, so I can see fish before I get to them, and I can through to them,” he said. “So whichever way my arrow points, is where the fish are at.”

Reich certainly has earned his own deep knowledge of fishing.

Fishing and simply being out in the beauty of North Carolina’s water is, for Paul, something that is its own reward.

“Just look,” Paul said, pointing to the Badin Lake shoreline all around him. “God made this for us to come out and enjoy and be a piece of it, to wind down, to get away from the hustle-bustle of the real world.”

What’s changed for Paul, besides the high-tech way he finds fish, is the high-tech way he tells his fish stories these days.

“It started out just friends and stuff, and folks started out commenting like crazy, wanting to know what I’m doing, how I’m doing it,” he said. “The whole reason the YouTube page was even created…it was an accident. My daughter did it.”

Paul has developed a dedicated following for his stories about being on the lakes fishing, mostly for crappie.

“I love bass fishing, too. But these crappie are the best-eating fish,” he said. “My mother loves these…I’ll take the tails off the fish, fry the tails up. She’ll eat it like a potato chip.”

“(Crappie) have such beautiful, white flaky meat when you fry it up…best-eating fish in the world as far as I’m concerned,” Paul said.

See some of his popular videos in this edition of the Buckley Report.