Making the transition to becoming a professional angler has been challenging so far. There is a lot of time that goes into the preparation for the year. This includes anything from getting the boat ready for each event, to booking rooms, to preparing rods, reels and tackle. With that being said I knew what I was getting myself into. My whole life I have been dreaming of doing this and I started small with local tournaments and slowly moved my way up to the BFL’s. The last few years I have been fishing for the college team at UNC Charlotte. Fishing for the college team prepared me for how much time I was going to spend away from home. Just to give you a gauge of how much, I bought my new truck a year and a half ago and it already has 45,000 miles on it!
With each event we have a cut off of when we can’t be on the water anymore before the event. This falls thirteen days before the first official practice day. For this event being my first one and never have been to this lake, I decided to go and pre-practice. When we arrived in Clewiston the temperature was around 40 degrees and in Florida terms you mightas well not even go fishing. Florida fish don’t do well with cold weather because they are not used to it. So my first impression of the lake was very tough to judge just because of the conditions.
My first event as a professional angler was the Walmart FLW Tournament on Lake Okeechobee last month. Okeechobee is by far one of the biggest bodies of water I have ever fished. When you look at a map of the lake it can be very overwhelming because as a tournament angler you want to cover as much water as possible and have as many patterns as you can just in case some of them fall through. Although the lake is massive it fishes relatively small; it is a shallow grass lake, no deeper than ten feet at the deepest part. For official practice we have three days to figure out what the fish are doing. Day one of practice was extremely tough for me just like it was when I went weeks before to pre-practice. Days two and three however were the complete opposite; it felt like almost everywhere I went I found fish, and some really big ones which Lake Okeechobee is known for. In practice, I figured out that you would have to pick through a lot of small keeper fish(12 inches is a keeper) to get to the bigger fish, but they would all be confined in a small area.
Day one of the tournament couldn’t have gone much worse for me, which is obviously not what I wanted in my first event. I lost several key fish that would have got me around the 20 pound mark, which is what you need for this lake. I ended the day with 14.0 pounds, good enough for 61st place after day one. Day 2 was incredible! I caught a small limit, quick, and then at around 10 o’clock I caught a 5 pounder and one almost 9 pounds! I made a huge jump and finished the event in 24th place. The top 20 get to fish the next day which I missed the cut by one pound but all in all I was happy with the event.
Support – this is the word that helped me the most with this event. My family and girlfriend flew down to watch the weigh in. I got text messages, emails, Facebook messages all throughout the week wishing me luck. Needless to say, I have the best fans anyone could ask for.
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