The 2019 Lake Erie Walleye Trail season has come and gone… It was tough, I knew it could be, the big fish on Erie are as hard as I’ve ever seen in my tournament career to target specifically, at least in my eyes.  Congrats to the guys who dialed them in!  Dan and I ended up with a mediocre, but I guess respectable 20th, 7th, 20th, and 26th out of 60 boat fields in the 4 respective tournaments and ended up in 14th in the Team of the Year Standings. 

Here are some words that come to mind as I sit here and reflect back on the season…

Grateful

Grateful that I get to fish and compete at at my favorite sport in the world. Grateful that Julia keeps the fort intact while I go do this.   Dan really put things in perspective as we were heading out on June 8th, tournament day… “We’re pretty darn lucky, we are doing this, and 75 years ago today, 150,000 Americans lost their lives fighting for what we have today.”  Wow.  Grateful for all the great sponsors I have in the fishing industry:  Starcraft, Vic’s, Mercury, Lowrance, Off Shore Tackle, World Wide Marine, Northland Tackle, Berts Custom Tackle, Aqua Vu, Engel Coolers, Pure Fishing, it not easy to do this and keep fighting through a tough season, these sponsors keep me fighting.  

Humbling 

I haven’t really fished a lot of the smaller grass roots circuits on Erie in the last few years as I’ve been more focused on the national stage.   I’ve kept an eye from a distance, and as you may have read in one of my previous blogs about tournament fishing, I knew these guys were good.  We cashed 1 check in these 4 tournaments, ouch, it can happen to anyone, but I personally expect better.  But I also don’t think there is as much of a talent gap as one might think between a circuit like this and an NWT.

Enlightening

Honestly, I think it’s easier for me to compete on the bigger stage when traveling.  What? How?  When I saddle up for one of the big tourneys, its a 100% commitment.  5 days of practice, months of research, endless prep, 14 hour days on the water and nothing else to do but FISH and prep for a week.  You learn SO much more about these huge bodies of water like this.   With these LEWTS this year, I was only able 1 to maybe 2 days of practice, and even those days I would do my best to get home to see the kids, play, read a story, and help them to bed.   3 kids under the age of 5, I have to and want to be there for them, but I’m sure it doesn’t help my tournament game.  One day I’ll be back to being the maniac that I was in my 20s, and put 5 full days of practice in for a $50 buy-in club tournament, and hopefully one of those girls will be right by mysids wanting to compete with me!  Just not today.   

Awestruck

I couldn’t help but be awestruck how much tournament fishing has changed since I got into it in the mid 2000s, everywhere, but especially Erie.   When we started doing this 10+ years ago, we hardly carried a crank bait in the boat past mid April, it was all spinners and crawlers.  I talked to a teammate of mine a day before the tournament and he didn’t have any crawlers in the boat.  It made me laugh a bit, not because I thought it was a bad play by him to commit to the crank bait bite that hard, but more so just because of how tell tale it was of how much tournaments on Erie in recent years have been dominated by crank baits. I thought “Why? What had changed?”  I think its a lot of all the new baits we have accessible and how good guys have become at controlling the depth of those crankbaits.  The top baits we and most guys were using this year didn’t even exist 5 years or so ago:  Bandits, Flicker Minnows, and P10s.  People definitely used to snap weight crank baits back in the day, but not with the precision that is done today.   The precision trolling app and all the speeds and line diameters that you can calculate has really changed the game.   Also, just the endless hours and days guys have spent dragging crank baits around Erie, you/they have learned ALOT.  

For sure, the highlight of this years tournaments so far is landing 2 BIG fish in the Fish Crazy Walleye Derby.  Dan got an 11.55lb tank will practicing for the Sandusky event that ended up in 3rthatd place for $2,400. We thought we had it won when that fish hit the deck!  The cool thing was that we were right outside Cranberry Creek Marina when we caught it, so we put her in the live well, weighed her, and were able to get a successful release!  Not many derby weighed fish have been released, I promise you , and we were happy to do so!

And Stella, oh my, got an 9.76lber for 5th place in the kids division!  It was so cool.   The fish hit on a bottom bouncer and gold perch Northland baitfish image blade #5, I handed her the rod, she propped it up against a rod holder and pulled that fish all the way in on her own!  The look on here face, she was SO excited!   “DAD can we go weigh it!”  She, even at 5 years old, knew it was a special fish and I think she’s got a bit of that competitive bug in her.  She won $800, so cool, and I was so proud.

What’s next?  I know lots of fishing, hopefully lots with the kids, other than that I’m not really sure.   I want to get in some more local tournaments, there are a few on the radar, we’ll see the schedule shakes out.   I WANT badly to compete in some of those NWTs and even the NTC, and it’s tough watching them from a far, but this year I committed to staying local.  I’ll definitely be back on that national stage again, just not sure when, hopefully next year…