The Inside Line

When B.A.S.S. first released the 2018 Bassmaster Elite Series schedule, I saw plenty of opportunity. Most of the venues seemed perfectly suited to my style of fishing, and I was anxious to get things rolling.

Unfortunately, with each passing event that optimism faded. In the end, I was left with the worst season of my 30-plus-year career.

Every summer the Bassmaster Elite Series heads north, and that means big waves and big smallmouth. It is a fun way to fish but it also takes additional preparation to make sure my boat and the gear I use to tackle those big bronzebacks give me the best possible chance at success. Here are a few things I do to make sure all of my equipment is ready for the big water.

New lakes are always exciting, but they can be equally intimidating. I knew virtually nothing about Lake Oahe in South Dakota, other than it was huge and full of smallmouth bass … or so was the claim.

Entering this event, my expectations were high. The Upper Mississippi is thick with vegetation and other forms of shallow cover, perfect for my style and approach. In fact, my first trip to LaCrosse was particularly rewarding. The frog bite was off the hook, and I finished well within the money.

After a three-month postponement, BASS was finally able to hold the Sabine River event at Orange, Texas. The river was now back within its banks and conditions were stable after weeks of flooding.

Site selection for this year’s Texas BASSfest event was Lake Travis — a beautiful, deep and clear reservoir near the city of Austin.

During the pre-spawn, my bait of choice is a jerkbait and during the post-spawn, I love to throw topwater. This is nothing out of the ordinary as just about every bass angler uses these techniques during those times of the year, but one thing I like to mix in during both of these periods is a soft plastic jerkbait like the Yamamoto D-Shad. I fish it as a complement to my hard jerkbaits and walking topwater baits.

When I leave my house to head out to fish the Potomac River, I make a right turn out of the driveway, a left turn at the first intersection, and about a quarter mile down the road there is a flagpole with a massive American flag. That’s my first sign of how the day will go. If it’s standing perpendicular to the pole, straightened by a brisk wind, I know that I am about to get my 48-year-old back pounded into submission.

Plenty of young tour-level pros have 3-year or 5-year plans for getting their careers off to a good start, but comparatively few pros of any experience level or vintage seem to be ready for what happens when you win a Bassmaster Classic.

After an offseason where we spent more time talking about the tournament landcape – and perhaps less about actual fishing – than ever before, I’ve sort of tapped out of the speculation game.

I met Jeff Teague at my first bass club meeting in early September of 1995, on the night that Cal Ripken passed Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive Major League games played. I was 25 and he was somewhere in his mid-30s and he knew far more about fishing than I did. It doesn’t seem all that long ago, but we’ve run a lot of water through the livewells since then. Ripken has been retired for 17 years. We’re still fishing.

I recognize that New Year’s Resolutions are contrived, often bound to fail, and to the extent they’re valuable should not be limited to a once-a-year endeavor. Why not start them in March or June or on a random Thursday in October?

I’ve been getting consistently published in bass magazines and on related websites for over a dozen years now, so even though I sometimes still feel like an absolute rookie, I guess that makes me an old salt. I came into the gig accidentally, with no contacts and no journalism experience, so I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way.

As I approach my 49th birthday in February, I’m pretty certain that I’m past the halfway the point of my life. Even if I’m not run over by a bus, killed by some woman’s jealous husband, or burned in a freak kiln accident, basic actuarial tables tell me that there’s a pretty good chance I’ve got about 30 trips around the sun until I’m worm food.

If you trust the history books, the town of Bessemer, Alabama is best known for the Bessemer steel process, a 19th century development that enabled the region, and eventually the nation, to mass produce inexpensive steel.