Well, another year of fishing with the Big Sandy Creek Bass Club is in the books.  With this year being my first year of being a full-time guide, I chose to largely stay out of the tournament scene and focus on my guide business this year.  However, I didn’t want to just not fish any tournaments at all, so I chose to commit myself to fishing every club tournament throughout the year in order to keep my competitive drive and ability going strong.  I’m not going to lie, I really wanted to take that Angler of the Year title this year.  I can think of two events that I felt like really hurt me this year.   [Read more…]

Well, with our club’s December meeting happening tonight, where we will vote in the first quarter’s worth of tournaments for 2016, it’s time to release my fantasy club tournament schedule for 2016!  Here are the lakes I’m hoping for and my reasoning behind each of them: [Read more…]

Well, I fished my first tournament out of my brand new Nitro Z18, and I gotta say, the new boat is off to a pretty solid start: 2nd place out of a 275 boat field.  It was an extremely bitter/sweet experience though.  We missed the big win (and a new $30,000 boat) by a mere 0.37 pounds.  A pretty tough pill to swallow.  It seems like every year I fish this deal, I get pretty close to the win, but this was most definitely the closest I’ve been.  While getting so close to a big win is cool, that’s not the real reason I fish this tournament.  It’s about giving just a little bit back to our men and women serving in the armed forces. [Read more…]

It has been the longest and most stressful 4.5 months of my life, but it’s finally time to make the announcement!  I’ve got a new boat!!!  Such an enormous sense of relief.  There’s been a pretty solid plan in place for about 3 months now, but I have waited to make the announcement until I actually had the boat in my possession and ready to roll.  I’ve learned in my life that nothing is a done deal until it is actually a done deal, and it really wasn’t a done deal until this past week.  Before I go into details about that though, here’s the official announcement: I have teamed up with Bass Pro Shops / Nitro boats / Tracker and have joined their Pro Staff.

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This whole not having a boat thing SUCKS.  I’m going on about 2.5 months now of no boat.  I knew in the back of my mind that there was the possibility of this happening, but I didn’t think it actually would.  I figured, maybe a month and I’d be back in a boat.

Now, before I go into any details here, let me first say, that I have had access to a couple of friends’ boats who have been extremely generous in letting me borrow their boats to continue guiding.   [Read more…]