Hot Weather and Wild Dogs Lead to Late Season Burnout

I left Champlain and headed for the PAA event at Lake Norman, close to home. At that point I’d already been gone from home 14 or 15 weeks out of the year and I was hitting what turned out to be a full-fledged case of summer burnout. Leaving the nice climate of New York for Charlotte, where every day was going to be 98 degrees or more, it’s tough to keep your chin up.

Fortunately, Norman is a great tournament venue. It’s near a big city (Charlotte) so we were likely to have a lot of fans cheering us on. On top of that it’s a big lake, so you can run a pattern without finding people all over your stuff. Furthermore, it’s nearly been taken over by spotted bass, so there’s a great opportunity to fish for them deep, but you can also stay shallow in the dirtier water and hunt down largemouths. That’s what I intended to do – fish docks, brushpiles and all sorts of oddball bank stuff.

With such an outstanding field, a who’s who of both FLW and BASS pros, a top finish is something to be proud of, so it felt great to finish 13^th. Sure, I was 6^th after both the first and second days, and I saw a few fish that might’ve pushed me as high as 3^rd, but I never felt I was around the fish to win. Since it’s close to home, my family was there to cheer me on and the payout was good, so I consider Norman to have been a success.

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