By Dave Wolak

Boy was it as busy week. Yamaha was offering demo rides on the lake at the Bassmaster Classic for those wanting to see the performance of the new Yamaha VMAX SHO four stroke engine firsthand. I’d talk to people who had a lot of questions about the engine in the Yamaha booth every day at the Expo, and then send them down to the lake to take a test ride, and everyone who came back was just smiling and amazed at how well that engine performs.

I’d see a lot of the guys who went on test rides later in the afternoon at the Yamaha socials they had at the restaurant, and just about everyone I talked to said it was just awesome. It’s interesting to see how the word about the VMAX SHO four stroke has spread through the consumer side of the industry. I guess it’s just the branching out of everybody spreading the word—friends tell their friends and they tell their buddies–and I can see the momentum building where every day more and more people are asking me about this engine. By the end of the year, just about everybody will know about this engine and will want to take a ride with it.

It’s a pretty exciting thing to see the expressions on the peoples faces and hear their descriptions of the engine, especially when they’re the same things I’ve been saying four a couple of months now. A lot of these guys are techies who really know boats, performance motors and bass boats and how motors perform, and the reactions are all the same—they’re just as excited about the engine as I was the first time I ran one.

The Bassmasters Classic was a reflection of the same kind of weather that’s been going on across the entire east coast of the country right now. It was cold for an extended period, although it did warm up a little bit during the last day or two. We had several Yamaha guys who were right there in the end.

It was tough not being able to fish it. This is the second Classic I didn’t make in six years of fishing as a professional. I missed it by very little, which any time you’re fishing the Elite Series, everyone is on par with their technical skills and it comes down to a circumstantial thing that happened at an event where I had a few fish die on me and wasn’t able to cull them. In this series, eight or ten ounces makes a big difference, and for me, it meant the difference between fishing the Classic and spending time helping Yamaha and my other sponsors by doing television and radio interviews and working their booths.

I’m used to being there, but it was also important to me that I was here for the introduction of this motor. It’s a critical time in the boating and fishing industry, and being a part of a “changing of the guard” with the old motors is a historic event I feel privileged to be involved with. Everyone from Yamaha worked their butts off here, and to see the results of their hard work has been overwhelming. Again, I’d rather be fishing the Classic, but if I had to be sitting on the side, I couldn’t think of a better place to be than in the Yamaha booth.

I’m on the road now, heading out to California for the first event of the season in the Bassmaster Elite series. I left this morning, but over the past weekend I’ve been at a bunch of Bass Pro Shops doing seminars and appearances during their annual spring sales event. I was at Charlotte on Friday, Sevierville, Tennessee on Saturday and Clarksville, Indiana on Sunday.

I had to fly back to Charlotte, drive home and do a couple of little things—like packing my truck and loading up all my tackle and gear and back-up stuff before I got on the road. All last night until about 2:30 this morning all I did was shuffle stuff around and then hopped in the truck this morning, and I’ve been on the road about five hours and it’s snowing. I’m currently driving through a winter wonderland. I’m just past Charlotte and there’s all kinds of snow coming down.

I thought a couple of years ago when I moved to North Carolina from Pennsylvania that I would be getting away from this kind of weather, especially going into March. In the past few years I’ve been in T-shirts and shorts a lot—really moderate weather during the winter, and there were days when it was 70 degrees, but this year we’ve had a hard winter with a lot of snow and a lot of cold weather and bitter temperatures. So what better weather to take off in for California, and then it starts to snow as I pull out of my driveway.

So I’m just driving kind of slow and taking my time to make sure I make it out west safely and with my boat and tow vehicle in good working condition. This is about a 44 hour trip, so there’s no reason to rush. I’ll get there when I get there, but I’ll get there safely. I don’t start practice for the tournament until Monday morning, so there’s still plenty of time. The boat and I are ready to fish.

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