How I’m preparing for 2017

This will be my final blog of 2016, and it has me thinking about how I see 2017 shaping up.

One good thing you can say about our sport is that, every year, it doesn’t matter if you’re Angler of the Year, if you barely qualify for the Classic or if you finish last in the points, we all get a new beginning.

Some of us may want a new beginning because we had a not-so-good year and some of us really don’t want to start a new year because we’ve been on a roll for a long time. But that’s one thing about our sport — we start over and that gives you the ability to start fresh.

The guys that get beaten down have the opportunity to stand back up. It’s like what one of my teachers used to say the first day of school: “Starting out, everybody has an A, and if you keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re going to keep that A. Whenever you start doing inferior work, that’s when your grade starts dropping.”

At the beginning of the year, everybody’s leading Angler of the Year. Throughout the year, people start falling off and there’s always one guy standing at the end.

I think that to do well, a guy has to constantly look for ways to improve. So the first thing I’d like to improve on for next year is preparation. It’s not that I haven’t been prepared in the past, but of all the parts of my game with room to grow, that’s probably the biggest one.

I think the reason I haven’t done a great job in the past is the amount of time that it takes away from your family to sit down and look at a map, study results and other resources. That’s something that I feel I need to start doing a little better before next year.

I haven’t sat down to really organize my tackle in a few years. Usually, I just transfer it from one boat to another. But I think this needs to be one of those years where I invest the time into a full organization.

I need to determine what I’ll throw away, what I’ll keep. I’ll take an inventory of all my baits and order more of any colors I’ve run short on.

How long will that take? I could spend a week or more on this, but I hope to get it done in three to four days. I’ll start with the boxes where I keep the baits I use a lot, like my Booyah jigs and my terminal tackle. Then I’ll move on to the stuff I use less frequently. That way, if I get tired of it, I will have the most important items squared away.

Looking at some other key areas of my game, I’ll be pushing myself to improve…

Practice: It’s all about efficiency. I think if a guy does more study, he starts practice with a better understanding of the lake. If you’re more efficient in practice, you’re not wasting time and you’re covering a lot more water.

If you do this, you’ll open up a lot more patterns that could be productive over a four-day period.

Nutrition: Overall, I think I’m pretty solid here. I’d like to eat better, of course, but I think if we all ate well, we’d want to eat even better.

Even though I think I eat better than I did my first couple of years, because you improve a little bit every year, I still feel like I can make some better choices here.

One of the ways I can do this is to just take time and eat on the water. I do a pretty good job of pacing out my eating throughout practice days, but during the tournament is where I tend to slip.

I get so amped up to fish that I don’t want to waste a minute, and I hardly eat anything throughout the day. You feel the effects of that at night because you’re totally drained, and it’s hard to recuperate for the next day.

I have to do a better job next year of eating during tournament hours. I can make this adjustment by grabbing something quick while I’m going through a no-wake zone or idling out of the cove. That will make the second, third and fourth day of the tournament a lot easier.

Truck: I got a new Toyota Tundra recently and it’s off getting a makeover. Some of that’s cosmetic, but there’s also going to be some focus on storage efficiency, remote air bags and things that will make traveling easier. I’m not really a truck guy, but I have a friend who owns a truck shop and he knows my job and what I need.

You can’t overstate the importance of a dependable vehicle or the little details that make it more comfortable and functional. We spend a lot of time on the road and I’m looking forward to where 2017 will take me.