Before this year, I was in a drought of not winning. It had been four years since I won the 2022 Bassmaster Classic and Lake Chickamauga Elite. Winning the Classic, I think, affected me. I spent so much energy and time trying to win that trophy, and when I won it, I unintentionally let my guard down a little. I won what I had been chasing and had won a lot of events on top of that.
There are things that go on in life that slow you down a little too, and the bottom line is I didn’t win. I’m not going to lie; I started thinking about whether I was still capable of it. It tends to happen with bass fishermen when they get towards the end of their career.
Winning the 2026 Mountain Dew Bassmaster Elite at the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was a reminder that I can still win. Then, to get the second one at the 2026 Maxam Tire Bassmaster Elite at Pasquotank River/Albemarle Sound, it changes the mindset 180 degrees. Now all I want to do is win again. Driving home from the Pasquotank, all I was thinking about was how I could win at Lake Champlain in a few months.
These two trophies have absolutely energized me.
This gets said a lot, but this sport is so momentum driven. You can get on a bad streak, and the snowball just gets bigger and you can’t control it. You can be on a good streak, and things just happen at the right time. You don’t even have to think about deciding; you just do it and have confidence in it.
When you are having bad events, no matter how hard you try you can’t change it. It has to change itself. I missed the last two Classics and finished dead last at Lake Martin before we went to Tombigbee, and I didn’t feel like I had a legitimate chance to win until the third quarter of the event. That’s when I could feel the momentum shift in a positive direction.
The first day, I went to an area I thought I was going to do well in and didn’t. I came back and caught some in the winning area. The second day, the first hour I was there, I thought to myself that it could be won in that hole. Seth Feider was in that area too and was having a good tournament. He asked me that day at the weigh-in if it could be won there? And I told him, “This event will be won out of that hole, it will either be me or you.” Everything set up for the bass to keep coming.
The third morning, Seth and I had parted and made circles around this area. I had located a couple underwater stumps and was working my way to them. Seth hollered at me and asked how many I had, and I was in the middle of telling him I had two when I brought my spinnerbait by one of those stumps and caught the biggest bass of my tournament. That gave me another option other than just fishing the bank. I started to fish some of the stuff you couldn’t see, and that made the difference.
At Tenn-Tom, I was in my comfort zone throwing a spinnerbait, swim jig and doing a little bit of flipping. At the Albemarle Sound, it was all about the urchin. I felt like I could have caught them doing something different, but I don’t think I could have won. I did catch two on a bladed jig, but it was the way these bass were set up, especially in the trees, that made the urchin good.
There may have been 7 or 8 feet of water next to the tree, but they wanted to be 2 feet under the surface. They wanted to be near the surface, and I could float the urchin above them. When I moved shallow, and I caught a lot of big bass shallow, I could just speed up the retrieve and keep the bait in my hand.
Around midday on the third day, I only had three bass before I caught a 9 1/2-pounder. When I caught that, I knew I was going to be fishing on Championship Sunday. It calmed me down, because I knew I had earned plenty of points for the Classic. Anything I did after that was icing on the cake. Then 15 minutes later I caught a 7-pounder that filled out my limit.
When I caught that, I thought to myself I might be 4 pounds back, but I’m going to have a chance to win. Turns out, I entered the final day with the lead. All you can ask for on the final day is having a chance.
There was a night-and-day difference between the last day and the first three days of that event. The first couple days, I would catch one early, but it took until I had to leave the Chowan River at 1 p.m. to fill out a limit. And my biggest fish would come at the end of the day. The second day I didn’t even fill out a limit.
The last day was totally opposite. I caught my two biggest right off the bat, caught a limit and had 26 pounds by 10:30. When I caught the fifth one, I almost pulled the trolling motor up and left. I ended up hanging out for another hour or so before I left. I told my cameraman I had a better chance of winning being at the dock way early than staying in the Chowan trying to catch a 5-pounder and cutting it close on time and risking the health of the bass.
There’s nothing like the run across the Albemarle Sound. To get to the Chowan, you leave the Pasquotank River, a relatively calm river, and drive straight into and through the ocean basically and then into the Chowan. It gets big in the Sound. The difficult part is, you aren’t fishing out there, so you don’t know how nasty it is or how much the wind is blowing. A couple times, it was dead calm in the Chowan, and I thought the ride back would be easy. Sure enough, you get to the bend where you can see the Sound, and it was choppy.
The first day was the worst day, and that worked out in my favor. I know a lot of guys turned around. As I was running that morning, there would be a boat on my right and they would stop and turn around. A mile later, there would be someone on my left heading back. If it had been the third day, guys would have been committed and gone anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a long run. It is rough and stressful, but I kind of like it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Half the field would have been in there fishing if the Sound was like glass.
To win 10 B.A.S.S. events and join a group like Kevin VanDam, Roland Martin, Denny Brauer and Larry Nixon is hard to explain. It really caught me off guard. Those guys are the foundation of the sport. To be a part of that is surprising.
There is a certain sense of gratitude I feel knowing I’ve joined that group too. I’ve worked my butt off to get to this point, and I know those guys did too. I sacrificed a lot for it. I’ve been lucky too. The second day of the Pasquotank, I hooked a bass I thought was a 5-pounder and was actually an 8-pounder. I swung it in the boat. Most people lose that bass. I got it in. You have to have some breaks, and I have had a lot of breaks go my way.
