Canterbury holds on in tightest AOY race
It’s inevitable.
Some anglers end the season on a high with great anticipation to start the next campaign. Others finish with regrets and a lot of what-could-have beens, yet they also can’t wait to get back out there and compete.
So was the 2019 Bassmaster Elites Series, which ended with a fantastic finish last week at the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship on Lake St. Clair. While Seth Feider ran away with weight title, the coveted AOY crown went down the final day and final angler to weigh-in.
Scott Canterbury went into St. Clair with a 9-point lead in the season-long point race over Chris Zaldain, while Cory Johnston lurked 14 points back and Stetson Blaylock was 20 behind. There has never been an AOY Championship with as many competitors having a shot to win. And it even tightened up. Each led the race, albeit some only momentarily, at some point during the event.
Zaldain took a 2-point lead over Blaylock, 4 over Canterbury and 9 over Johnston going into Day 2. Canterbury retook the lead on the final day, but the four anglers were only separated by 8 points. A photo finish was still in the cards.
After Blaylock and Johnston tied, Canterbury came to the scales needing to finish 22nd or better to win the AOY. His bag of 19 pounds, 12 ounces moved him into 14th and he became the 24th angler to win one of the 50 AOY titles awarded by B.A.S.S.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve been so blessed to be here and be a part of B.A.S.S. It’s been an unbelievable year. This just proves that dreams can come true.”
It was an incredibly consistent year for Canterbury, whose worst finish was a 49th — he was 22nd or better in all the rest including runner-up and third-place finishes. With the lion’s share $100,000 from the $1 million AOY Championship total payout, Canterbury totaled $215,500 in B.A.S.S. earnings in 2019.
Yet there were days he struggled, worried about making the cut, only to change up and rally late in the day.
“Things have just went right, when I felt like it wasn’t going to,” he said. “When it’s meant to be, you can’t stop it. Everybody talks about pressure. I’ve been at peace all year. I’ve had things go wrong, but it’s just worked out.”
Canterbury could easily have fallen out of contention on the final day at St. Clair. He said he had two fish around noon before catching almost 20 pounds from a rock pile. He told of several other great turnarounds in his season, like at St. Johns and Winyah Bay. He finished the year with 848 points, 8 ahead of Blaylock and Johnston, but he could have easily have been that far behind if not for his rally.
Read Canterbury’s own words on how “I had to catch ‘em.”
Feider schools ‘em on St. Clair
It’s odd Seth Feider left Lake St. Clair saying he got lucky after totaling 77-15 to best Blaylock by 6-8 and everyone else by more than 10 pounds.
With Day 1 winds and waves preventing him from going to schools he had found on the south end, he ran into a wad even more productive on a famed buoy, reeling in his big bag of 26-12 along with the Phoenix Boats Big Bass of 6-12 to open his wire-to-wire win.
“I literally caught them off the Firecracker, the biggest community hole on the lake,” he said. “I never practiced there. I just drove by, nobody was sitting there and caught like 26 pounds like that. I had nothing. I caught nothing up here in practice. I got super lucky catching that big bag up here the first day.”
With winds calmed on Days 2 and 3, Feider enjoyed a whackfest on his rock piles that thrilled the Bassmaster LIVE audience. The most telling moment of his time on air was when he came up empty on a cast, turned to cameraman Wes Miller and delivered a satirical line of surprised disappointment: “I didn’t catch one on that cast,” he deadpanned.
Like his back-to-back-to-back catches, the one-liner hits kept coming from Feider, who allowed a couple of his running buddies to join in the fun before he left early to weigh in.
“Wes was getting tired of holding the camera,” Feider quipped. “I had to get him in because his shoulder gets sore.”
Feider, who won his second Elite event, actually topped his winning weight (76-5) of smallmouth at the 2016 AOY Championship on Mille Lacs Lake near his home. Feider began the week eighth in AOY points but moving up to fifth added $7,000 to increase his check from St. Clair to $61,500, which included $25,000 for winning the event.
Besides wanting to earn a Century Belt by topping 100 pounds of smallmouth, which might be possible in next year’s four-day Elite event on St. Clair, Feider has other goals at hand. He left the stage with another head-turning comment: “As far as the off season, I’m going to try to get my wife pregnant and kill a bunch of greenheads.”
Umm, good luck.
See his column, “Unbelievable St. Clair caps great year.”
Cook gets emotional after ROY win
Although he would have liked to finish stronger, Drew Cook ran away with the DICK’S Sporting Goods Rookie of the Year title and its first-ever $10,000 prize, totaling 798 points to top second-place Lee Livesay by 49.
“I really didn’t know what to expect from the Elites,” Cook said on stage before becoming emotional. “Going into the last two tournaments, you couldn’t have wanted anything better as a fan to watch this. Obviously I didn’t do what I needed to do, but still I cannot complain at all. Everybody on this shirt (his sponsors) gave a 24-year-old kid a shot. That’s all I could ever ask for. I couldn’t do it without them. I couldn’t do it without ya’ll.
“I have fished with B.A.S.S. every step there was, between high school, college, Nation, Opens and now the Elite Series. They were stepping stones for me. That is the most important thing to me — that other people, young kids just like me, have the opportunity to qualify for the Elites.”
Finishing seventh-place in points earned him $29,000, pushing his season total to $140,000.
Not bad, Rook. Congrats Drew.
Pulling it out of the fire
Skylar Hamilton and Jake Whitaker could have crashed and burned at St. Clair but ended up attaining their No. 1 goal. Both came into the event on the outside of the cutline looking in, but they rallied to secure a second Classic berth.
Hamilton started the farthest back in 45th, although he was only 6 points out of the cut, which stood at 42nd. Whitaker started as the first man out, 2 points back. Things began well as both climbed into the top 10 on Day 1 to move inside the Classic cut.
Each lost ground on Day 2, which put them as the last two in with little room to falter. Hamilton wound up 11th to finish 40th in points while Whitaker fell a couple places in the event to 24th. He tied Garrett Paquette with 611 points and thought he missed the tiebreaker of most weight on full field days, but his final day put him nearly 8 pounds ahead and on to Lake Guntersville to fish the 50th anniversary Classic.
Classic field at 49 and counting
There are 49 anglers qualified to fish on Guntersville next March 6-8. Brandon Cobb was the first Elite to secure a spot, winning the Toyota Bassmaster Texas Fest. While that was the only Elite event with an automatic bid, there are six win-and-in qualifiers from the Basspro.com Opens.
Whitney Stephens was the first back in January when he won the Eastern Open on the Harris Chain, and Darold Gleason was next with his Central Open win on Toledo Bend.
Caleb Kuphall made the Classic by winning on Smith Lake, then John Cox followed suit at Chickamauga, Grae Buck at Oneida and Bob Downey at Grand Lake. The Open winners at the James River (Mike Iaconelli), and the Mississippi River out of La Crosse, Wis., (Devin Teigen) didn’t fish all the events, so those berths pushed the Elite qualifiers down to 42nd place. Brian Snowden and Whitaker are thankful.
Bethel University angler Cody Huff earned the College Classic berth, and there are still four more who will qualify for the week-long fete out of Birmingham, Ala., and they’ll all have to accomplish that on Lake Hartwell.
From Nov. 6-8, the 2019 TNT Fireworks B.A.S.S. Nation Championship will be held on Hartwell with three advancing to the Classic. Then the three-time Classic venue will host the 2019 Bassmaster Team Championship Dec. 11-14, where the winner will get an early Christmas gift as the 53rd and final angler to make the hallmark Classic.
The anticipation for the Feb. 6-9, 2020 Elite season opener on the St. Johns River will begin to build and the long winter nights will be filled with thoughts of Big Bass. Big Stage. Big Dreams.