Let’s start this off by saying, “Well Done!” to Casey Ashley. He put together a fine tournament and in my opinion he’ll make a fine champion during 2015. The Bassmaster Classic is about winning. Nothing else matters much. He won.
I didn’t win, but I have to say I feel pretty good about things. Obviously, I’m a competitor and I’ll never be satisfied with anything short of first place. That’s a given. Nevertheless, I can live with this Classic.
I’ve written about my frustration over the past two or three years with my poor starts. It’s hard to put together a really great season when you dig holes as deep as I have been digging. It looks like I might have started differently this year. I hope so, anyway.
My Classic was basically error free. I didn’t lose any fish that I think I should have caught, I made pretty good decisions all three days and I stayed on my game plan even when things got tough. That was especially true on the final day.
Sunday morning was right out of my playbook. I went shallow to get started. I caught a couple and then, about 8:30 or so, I headed out to deep water where I thought the winning fish were. That wasn’t an easy call. I knew that the numbers were shallow. I also knew that my deep bites would be few and far between. Although, to tell the truth, I didn’t know I’d only get three bites in six hours.
I stayed with it, though. I was looking towards the win. If that wasn’t going to happen, I really didn’t care where I ended up. For that I have to say I’m proud of myself. In past years I might have gone back shallow to make sure I had a limit.
That’s why I feel so good about this year and the upcoming Elite Series tournaments.
If I can keep that mindset, I think I’ll have a really good year, one that I can be proud of when my career’s over. At some point you have to commit, and when you commit you have understand that it might not work out the way you have it planned. There’s a price to be paid if that happens. You have to be willing to pay that price.
So anyway, Becky and the kids are with me. We’re going to take the camper, the truck and the boat to Orange, Texas and then fly home. We could drive but that would cut our home time down by five or six days. We don’t want to do that. This way we’ll have a full two weeks at home to enjoy our family life before the season begins and everything gets crazy busy.
Next week we’ll talk about how I plan to attack the Sabine River and exact a little revenge on that fishery. Back in 2013 I finished in 83rd place with a grand total of 4.3 pounds of bass, and I put my boat in the trees. There’s room for improvement.
Mike Iaconelli’s column appears weekly on Bassmaster.com. You can also find him on Facebook andTwitter or visit his website, mikeiaconelli.com.
