Busy, busy May and June

The past couple of months have been a blur, lot's of time on the road with a couple weeks mixed in around home, I'm happy to be back around home now for a while.  

The FLW Tour regular season came to an end last week at Lake Champlain in New York.  It has been a great season for me and it was pretty cool to be in the mix for Angler of the Year heading into the final event.  A 29th place finish at Champlain landed me in 5th place overall in points, so I have qualified for my first Forrest Wood Cup and my first Toyota Texas Bass Fest event in 2017, so I'm very happy.  The Cup takes place in early August at Wheeler Lake in Alabama and will be the biggest tournament of my career by far.  I can't wait! 

I had some good friends from home who came to cheer me on at Champlain, which was pretty awesome! 
(L-R Sean Lougheed, Chad Reynolds, Laura Stasiak, Jeff Gustafson)

Champlain is a great lake with a pile of fish in it and I choose to spend most of my time smallmouth fishing.  It worked out pretty good with a 29th place finish, so I was happy!  I caught a bunch of fish each day.  

Loading up the boat after a long day of practice at Champlain!

 Kentucky Lake did not go quite as well but I was very fortunate to end up in 50th place and earned the last $10,000 cheque!  So I'll take it!  It's a great lake as well and I probably had the best practice I had all year for this one, things just didn't work out that great in the tournament.  A friend of mine made me some really nice hair jigs for this one and they worked!  

My Dad came along to practice for this one with me and caught his biggest bass...so he was jacked!

Before Kentucky Lake I was home for a few weeks and got to have some fun catching bass, walleye and crappies...I was eating good!  We have the best fishing on the planet right here in Ontario's Sunset Country Region.  

In mid-May I teamed up with my buddy, FLW Tour mega-star Cody Meyer for the annual Sturgeon Bay Open tournament and while we had a mediocre 32nd place finish, we managed to squeak into the prizes and got our money back.  We'll be back next year!  This is one of my favourite tournaments to fish every year.  

The first week of May I was at Pickwick Lake in Alabama for the fourth stop of the season and came out of there with a decent 32nd place finish.  It was the toughest fishing of the entire year so I was happy that I avoided a bomb there!  

I'm really looking forward to the upcoming bass tournaments that we have here in Sunset Country over the next few months, they are some of the best open, team tournaments in North America...I'll have my next update a lot sooner, I promise!