As we close another year, it’s time to take a look back at how it went, and to start making some plans for the upcoming year. So let’s take a look at my 2014 season. How did it go? I’m not really even sure how it went (ha!), so hopefully taking some time to go back and look will allow me to get a good picture of how I did. Let’s start with the Media Bass tournament trail…
Media Bass:
Jan – LBJ: It looks like I caught two fish. Well, that sucks. I honestly can’t remember anything about this tournament, but I think I blogged about it earlier this year. Let me read it really quick… ah yes, I remember. It just plain sucked. I caught 18 lbs while pre-fishing and then the bite just completely died in the tournament. Just a rough one it looks like.
Feb – Austin: This is the tournament that my lower unit went to crap on me while running to my first spot. Ended up on the trolling motor all day fishing unproductive water. I caught a couple of fish, but was so aggravated about the day I said screw making it back to weigh-in on time and just took a zero.
March – Austin: After a rough two tournaments, I made things come together in this one and managed a third place finish with 22.75lbs. It was a good day. In case you missed it, here’s the video:
April – LBJ: This was a mediocre tournament. Looks like I caught about a 12lb limit and finished 9th out of 30 entries. Not terrible, but definitely not as well as I would’ve like to have finished.
May – Stillhouse: Another disappointing tournament. My trolling motor steering cable broke about an hour into the tournament. Not good on what was a pretty windy day. I tried to make the best of a bad situation with not having a working trolling motor, but I ended up only weighing in 3 small fish.
Aug – Richland Chambers: After a fairly disappointing season, I was not feeling up to making the drive out to Richland Chambers. I figured I’d save myself the money on this one and just dropped out.
Overall: Yup, it pretty much sucked. I had one good tournament, but it looks like my main setback this season was boat/mechanical/equipment issues. Ugh. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again in 2015.
TTZ:
Jan – LBJ: Probably one of my better accomplishments in the 2014 tournament season. I had just fished the Media Bass tournament here the weekend before and sucked, but came back a week later for this tournament and finished in the money. My partner and I knew it was going to be a tough bite, put our heads down, and got the job done. We junk-fished our way to taking home a check and put some good bites in the boat that day. Not too shabby. Here’s the photo:
Feb – Austin: We were blown out of the water here. This tournament was ridiculous. It took 43 pounds to win and 20 pounds just to cut a check in 20th place. We knew that a lot of the field was going to be on the upper end of the lake fishing the remaining grass beds, but we figured it would be a zoo up there and would be difficult to manage the crowds. We threw the dice and stayed on the lower end. We caught a ton of fish, but obviously none of them were the quality that we needed. In retrospect, I suppose we should have fished in the crowds. It was a fun day, but we definitely got our butts kicked.
Mar – Canyon: The Media Bass tournament was the same day, and we knew that we were allowed to drop one tournament and still qualify to fish the championship. We decided to make this tournament our “drop” and didn’t fish.
April – Belton: Just a mediocre tournament. Finished 52nd out of 103 teams. Not very memorable either way.
May – Waco: This was the final blow to our season. I woke up the morning of the tournament with severe food poisoning. I tried forcing myself through it, but only made it about a block from my house towing the boat and had to pull over puking my guts out. I felt horrible and had to call my tournament partner to tell him our season was over. Since we already had one “drop” tournament, missing this tournament made us not qualify for the championship.
Overall: Man, this trail sucked, too. Getting food poisoning and missing the Waco tournament was really the deciding factor. We could have saved our season and qualified for the championship with a good finish at Waco, but nope! Disappointing.
Big Sandy Creek Bass Club: Not much to say. Due to a busy work schedule and having a baby in September, my activity in the club was slim to none. I fished ONE tournament with BSCBC all year long. And honestly, it was the highlight of my tournament fishing for the year!!! Har!!!! I managed to make it to the Inks Lake tournament that was held in I think August, and killed it. I had the heaviest bag in the individual standings with a 19lb bag. Started the day off strong with a 5lber on my first cast on a River2Sea Rover, and then put a whooping on them for the rest of the morning throwing a hollow-bodied frog. Just awesome, and again, the highlight of my 2014 tournament season.
Other Tournaments: It was such a busy year that I had almost no time for other tournaments. I remember fishing one TTZ Wednesday Nighter that went to crap right at the start of the tournament when my trolling motor cables were ripped from the batteries on a really rough ride down the lake. Other than that, the only tournament I remember fishing was Fishing for Freedom on Belton. Due to just having a baby less than a month earlier, I was unable to pre-fish for the tournament and just had to wing it. And as seemed to happen to me far too often in FFF, we figured things out too late in the tournament to do any good. However, I think we did manage to take 2nd place big bass and took home some money, so that was cool.
Overall, I’d say 2014 was a rough and tumble tournament season. Not one that I’m super happy about. So, it’s time to learn from it, and make 2015 a memorable one, in the positive direction!
So what are my tournament plans for 2015??? Honestly, not much. One of my biggest focuses with my fishing in general for 2015 will be to build my guiding business, which I will discuss in another blog post. I’ve decided to try and take it easy this year on the tournament scene and build myself up for an epic 2016 season. This year, my tournament focus will be on fishing with Big Sandy Creek Bass Club and qualifying for the B.A.S.S. Nation State Championship in 2016. It’s been a few years since I’ve given that a serious go, so we’ll see what happens. Maybe I can make the Classic. Har!!! I will probably still fish one or two Media Bass or TTZ trail events, but I won’t be super focused on them at all. The real focus is my guiding and making it to the state championship next year by fishing club events through this year. It should be a little more low key this year on the tournament scene, but I’m excited to get serious about the club tournaments this year.
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