I have to say that walking away from the final Progressive Bassmaster Elite Series event of 2026 with a top 30 finish felt good. The front half of my year was hit or miss, with more misses than hits, so I was happy to put together a better back half.
I had a Top 10 at the Pasquotank River, a top 40 at Lake Champlain and then a 27th-place finish to end the year at the St. Lawrence. After struggling through the first part of the year, finishing stronger was definitely encouraging.
The whole year, I felt like I fished well and made good decisions. It just wasn’t happening. I wasn’t generating enough bites, and when I did, I was catching mediocre fish instead of the right ones.
Fortunately, we got the bus back on the road at the St. Lawrence River and rode it to a good finish. It was a lot of fun, but it was also one of those shoulda, coulda, woulda events.
I think if everyone would’ve caught everything that bit, the leaderboard would have looked a lot different, even as good as the weights already were. It was definitely like that for me. We had some big winds during the event, but I don’t think any of the fish I lost were weather dependent. It was just a few unfortunate circumstances.
The first day, I had a really big one come off when the barb of my hook broke. After that, it was just typical smallmouth stuff, but it always seemed like the one you lost was a really big one.
Even with those disappointments, I can’t complain. I caught 50 to 75 fish a day. A lot of them were 4 to 4 1/4 pounds — not necessarily the ones you wanted to weigh in, but good ones to have in the box.
I caught 20 to 22 pounds really quickly every day, and then I would grind it out. Usually, I’d get a few 4 3/4- to 5-pound bites throughout the day, and that would slowly ease my weight up.
Based on my practice, I caught about what I thought I could catch. The biggest fish I weighed was a 5.07, and the smallest was a 4.46.
I was catching a lot of good fish, but I figured that one of the three days I would run into a 6-pounder. I actually had a 6-pound bite on two different days and lost both of them.
Overall, I had a lot of fun catching them, and I was super happy with the finish. I ended up missing the Bassmaster Classic cut by only five points, but that’s going to motivate me to work even harder in 2027 and improve my tournament strategy.
To summarize the season, this was probably the best year of bass fishing I’ve ever had, but also the worst. There was no consistency for me. I was either on the fish to have a chance at winning, or I was still searching for answers when the tournament started.
Too many times this year, I found myself going into an event without an exact plan. I didn’t know how I was going to start the tournament. I need to do a better job during practice of locating fish that can help me have a solid event instead of focusing only on finding the fish that can win.
I can’t put all my eggs in the basket of trying to win. I need to find multiple deals that give me a chance to have a good tournament, while still having something that could potentially win.
A big part of that comes down to time management. I work better with more fishing time than less, and almost every tournament where I did well this year, I stayed local. At the Pasquotank River, I made the Top 10 fishing super local. At the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, I almost won it literally a mile from the ramp.
The Classic was really the only event where I did well after making a big run, but even there, I had several local spots I could fish on my way back.
You have to give everything a chance and realize you don’t always have to run far to catch the fish you need.
