I’m really excited about next Sunday’s Ike Live show. Dave Mercer, Bassmaster Elite Series emcee, will review the 2014 Elite Series season. The show will air for two hours starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You can watch it from my site, www.mikeiaconelli.com.
The reason I’m so worked up over this thing is that Mercer is in a unique position to see and appreciate what happened during every event. He sees every angler and watches each bag of fish get weighed. He also gets to interview the anglers before they’ve had time to think about their answers.
That gives him a view of things that only a handful of other people have. And, Mercer knows fishing so his questions and his observations this Sunday will give us all insight into the world of professional bass fishing.
Besides getting ready for that show I haven’t done much since my last post. I fished another event, got home this weekend and have been doing yard work and landscaping pretty much nonstop from there.
I’m going to tell you a family secret not everyone knows. I married a landscaping architect, or something darn close to it. Whenever I’m gone and she’s been at home I return to some serious outdoor projects. She walks around the yard, surveys most of what’s there and then puts a plan of redesign into place.
They’re serious plans, too. Sometimes she marks the yard with a shovel, digging to mark her places. At other times, however, she uses ground paint to lay everything out — for me.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve grown to like it. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It’s hard to imagine Ike working with a pick and shovel.
I would have said so myself years ago. I mean, if someone had said that I’d be doing serious landscaping in my spare time I’d have thrown them out of wherever we were. That’s not true anymore. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I like it.
There’s a whole science behind all that stuff. You can’t just look at a plant, say it’s pretty and plant it in a hole. No, absolutely not. You have to consider your climate as well as sun and shade availability. Aesthetic things matter, too. You wouldn’t want a pink flower to clash with a red one and you wouldn’t want flower gardens that didn’t blend and flow together, would you?
Anyway, I’m into it. Another thing I like about landscaping is that it has nothing to do with fishing. As much as I like to chase bass it’s necessary to get away from them for a while. It refreshes your mind and makes you want to go back out there when you put your pick and shovel in the garage.
Next week we’ll try to get back to fishing stuff. I’d like to do a column or two about the late fall into winter transition. That’s tough for a lot of us. It can be made a lot easier and a lot more productive, however, if we keep a few basic rules about bass behavior in mind.
Mike Iaconelli’s column appears weekly on Bassmaster.com. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter or visit his website, mikeiaconelli.com.
