There are a lot of great things to remember about this season. A lot of incredible things, actually if you look at the season as a whole: Things that will give us a warm and fuzzy feeling about 2017.
If you look back at this season in a few years, we will likely remember a truly epic AOY race between Brandon Palaniuk and Jason Christie along with Jacob Wheeler.
We will remember Jordan Lee pulling off the improbable at Conroe; Aaron Martens sneaking a win away from Seth Feider; Palaniuk and Brent Ehrler having a heavy-weight match-up at Sam Rayburn; Wheeler getting help from Dustin Connell at Cherokee; then Connell holding off the Elite giants at Ross Barnett; or Timmy Horton showing us some old guys aren’t done; with John Murray proving it again at Toledo; while Kennedy catches a surprise big fish in the final on Dardanelle to win.
In strict terms, Sunday is the final day of the 2017 Elite Series season. I know we have a Classic Bracket next week, but that’s with eight guys.
This event, though, with 50 qualifying anglers will crown a Toyota Angler of the Year with the last fish weighed. That typically denotes the end of the season. For those of us who have been doing this for a long time, really doing anything for a long time, you like retrospection. It actually becomes a habit.
The 2017 season has some things I won’t forget. For starters, and still feeling the aches of 4-footers from Friday, I believe I can say this has been the roughest, bumpiest and most Advil-fueled year I’ve seen in 30 years.
We’ve had some truly rough tournaments in years past. I can still remember a Lake Erie event where the rollers were so big James Overstreet shot photos of smallmouth that were actually above anglers at the top of one of those waves, while the boat and angler was in the bottom of the trough. Those events hurt. They also just come along every once in a while.
Aches and pains along with wind and waves have marked this season. It actually started at Lake Okeechobee, which can get big and nasty. Thankfully it has the Rim Canal, which allows you to get out of it for most of the lake. So it doesn’t really count, even though it served up some bumps and bruises.
Then came Lake Conroe, the consistently bumpiest lake in the country. They call it the Gulf of Conroe, with lots of seawalls and boat traffic that just keeps it churning.
That was followed by Toledo Bend where boat lanes and timber require you to run 10 miles around to get to a spot 1-mile away. In 3- and 4-footers you start feeling your age. It was the same at Sam Rayburn. Texas lakes are just notorious for bumpy rides and wind.
We thought we were going to get a break from that at Ross Barnett. The weather actually cancelled one day, but not before the perfect wind made the lower end of that a washing machine of bumps. Dardanelle was easy compared to those, even though the high water created it’s own issues.
The perfect wind at the St. Lawrence River created 3-footers for guys traveling 50 miles in one direction or more. Lake Champlain has always had its rough factor, enough to cancel a day but by the end of that event it was showing its teeth again.
Then it was off to St. Clair where it was more of the same. Now we are at Mille Lacs and the 3- and 4-footers seem to be following us around.
Like I said earlier, there are a lot of great things to remember about this season. For me though, at least today, that warm and fuzzy feeling about 2017 is the heating pad on my back and neck.