Roberie turns childhood hobby into career

By: TONY MARKS
Editor

Many philosophers of our day, such as Marc Anthony, have expressed, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
While this sounds like a cliché to most, a Ville Platte resident took this saying to heart as he turned his childhood hobby of fishing into a career in the marine business.
“I got involved in something that I grew up having a passion for,” said Jacob Roberie, now of Gonzales. “It never really feels like a job. It’s like I’m helping other people through my experiences growing up doing it.
Roberie’s fishing experiences began at a young age when his father, Tom, took him to Miller’s Lake, Chicot Park, and other areas.
“We lived out in the country,” Roberie said, “and I grew up pond hopping and going fishing. Since I’ve been a little boy, I used to go fishing with my dad. That was something big that we did that was involved in outdoors.”
For Roberie, fishing back then was more simplified than it is today. “Growing up as a kid,” he said, “you didn’t have the money to play in the expensive part of it like buying big fishing boats like they have nowadays. Whenever I started out as a kid, we would go to Chicot, and, most of the time, we were fishing on a 14X36 aluminum boat with a 25-horsepower motor in the back. It was just simple with crickets. We’d go to Cary’s and buy our crickets or a little bit of tackle.”
After graduating from Sacred Heart in 1997, Roberie earned his degree from Louisiana State University in 2002. He then began working in the marine business and soon became employed at the newly constructed Cabela’s in Gonzales. Now, he works at a private dealership selling boats, motors, and ATVs.
Besides using his childhood fishing experiences in his career as a salesman, Roberie also uses those experiences to educate and inform listeners through modern means of communication.
“It’s an outdoor themed podcast,” Roberie said. “It has to do with hunting, but we also do some fishing stuff as well.”
The podcast began four or five years ago before such programs were really popular. The idea spawned out of what Roberie considered to be a lack of up to date information.
“By the time you see some of the fishing reports that come out or the hunting reports that come out on TV,” he said, “they’re outdated. They might be a month or two weeks old, so you never really get updated information.”
He continued, “I heard of podcasts and started listening to a couple of them that were coming out. I said I could do that because I have the knowledge to talk about that and educate other people about it. I said I could give accurate information that’s up to date where people don’t have to wait a month or so to get.”
For his first podcast, Roberie went back to his roots and did an episode on squirrel season.
He said, “Even though I wanted my podcast to be based on waterfowl hunting, I wanted to branch out in other areas of hunting and fishing too. My very first podcast was a squirrel hunting episode talking about our traditions growing up in Ville Platte and about how we got out of school. That was a huge weekend for our culture and our heritage.”
Even with his career and his podcasts, Roberie still makes time for what he grew up doing. But, now, fishing has a different component to it.
As Roberie explained, “Growing up, we fished land locked lakes. When you come south below I-10, it’s all tidal influence that’s affected by the Mississippi River and the Red River. So, you have to pay attention to the tide and the water levels because they constantly change. That can affect how good fishing is or how bad it is.”
There is another difference now. “I still fish a lot of bass and a lot of white perch,” said Roberie. “When you get below I-10, though, all the guys down south call it ‘sacalait.’”
Fishing, for Roberie, is important to a lot of people because it is a way of passing down traditions to children and grandchildren. It also is so enjoyable because it is a stress release.
“People can get away from the normal everyday stresses of life like work or whatever is bothering them,” expressed Roberie. “They can go out to the lake and have an enjoyable day to get their minds off of the real world issues they are dealing with.”