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Last-Minute Big Fish Helps Palaniuk Hold On To Lead In AOY Race At Mille Lacs
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. Photo by Seigo Saito/B.A.S.S.ONAMIA, Minn. — After two days of the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship, Brandon Palaniuk is still clinging to his lead in the race for the AOY season title.
But it’s been anything but easy.
The noted smallmouth specialist from Hayden, Idaho, caught just 10 smallies from Mille Lacs Lake Friday — and if hadn’t been for a 6-pounder that bit extremely late, he might have actually fallen out of the AOY lead.
“I just struggled to get bit,” Palaniuk said. “I was just catching one here, one there — and I wasn’t really catching any big ones. But then at 3:14 (p.m.), I made one final drop and caught a 6-pounder.”
That fish helped Palaniuk weigh in 21 pounds 1 ounce, which was good for 20th place in the daily standings and enough to keep him in the AOY lead. With 902 total points, Palaniuk leads Jason Christie (890) and Jacob Wheeler (885) by margins that can still be made up if things go wild in the final round.
Palaniuk’s big fish came so late Friday that he barely made it back to the check-in on time.
“I caught the fish at 3:14, check-in was 3:20 and I was 3 miles away,” Palaniuk said. “On top of that, I still had to cull.
“I ended up making it back with 40 seconds to spare. But that fish was a 3-pound cull. Without it, who knows where I would be?”
Since Palaniuk came into this event with a 15-point lead in the AOY standings, the ideal situation would have been for him to pile up the weight while his closest competitors — Christie and Wheeler — struggled.
That hasn’t happened.
After catching 20-8 Thursday, Christie caught 22-9 Friday and jumped from 26th place to 17th. That helped him move to within 12 points of Palaniuk in the standings, meaning another fantastic day — coupled with a tough day for Palaniuk — could land Christie his first career AOY title.
Christie said Thursday that he hoped for a weather change that might mess up other people’s patterns — presumably Palaniuk’s and Wheeler’s — and he regretted it today. “I got what I wanted,” he said, “but it just made those fish bite for them.
“Today, at 8 o’clock, I was kind of wishing I hadn’t said that.”
The higher winds and larger waves made it hard for Christie to keep his trolling motor in the water and to see the fish on the Garmin Panoptix unit he relies on. He said most of his bass came out of one school he felt fortunate to find.
“Luckily, I came across one group and I caught 22 pounds in probably 10 to 15 minutes,” he said. “The rest of the day, I caught one here and one there, but I never caught a big one.”
While Palaniuk and Christie had it tough, Wheeler said “fun would be an understatement” to describe the day he had on Mille Lacs. The first-year pro from Tennessee caught 24-5 and moved into fourth place in the daily standings.
He still trails Christie by five points and Palaniuk by 17 in the AOY race.
“It was flat-out awesome,” Wheeler said. “It was probably one of the best days of smallmouth fishing I’ve ever had. I probably caught 30-plus smallmouth — and there were a lot of times when I would be disappointed to realize it was ‘just another 4-pounder’ when I set the hook.”
New York angler Jamie Hartman, whose stated goal was to win the Bassmaster Rookie of the Year award when the season began, took the lead in that race by weighing in 23-10 Friday and jumping from 48th to 36th place in the daily standings. That gives him a 776 to 770 lead over Alabamian Dustin Connell in the ROY race.
Texas angler Keith Combs is threatening to run away with the daily standings after landing 24-15 for the second straight day. His two-day mark of 49-14 is more than 2 pounds better than that of second-place angler James Elam (47-4).
Combs stands to win $25,000 if he retains the lead through the end of competition, but the rest of the $1 million purse will go to him and the rest of the field based on their final standings in AOY points.
The full field will fish again Sunday to determine the AOY Championship and the event winner. Takeoff will be at 6:50 a.m. CT from Eddy’s Resort, and the final weigh-in will be held at 3:45 p.m. at Grand Casino Mille Lacs.
The field will take a break Saturday for Bassmaster University. Anglers will be conducting seminars and greeting fans near the weigh-in stand at Grand Casino Mille Lacs in conjunction with the Bassmaster Elite Series Outdoors Expo. Companies such as Toyota, Huk, Power-Pole and Berkley will be onsite featuring their latest products. Fans will be able to enjoy free boat and motor demo rides from Skeeter, Yamaha, Nitro, Triton and Mercury. There will also be arts and crafts and food vendors and activities for kids.
All venues are free and open to the public. The expo will begin at 11 a.m. CT. For more information and a full list of activities, visit Bassmaster.com/news/attend-toyota-bassmaster-angler-year-championship.
The championship is hosted by Grand Casino Mille Lacs.
2017 Bassmaster Elite Series Platinum Sponsor: Toyota
2017 Bassmaster Elite Series Premier Sponsors: Huk, Humminbird, Nitro Boats, Mercury, Minn Kota, Power-Pole, Shell Rotella, Skeeter Boats, Triton Boats, Yamaha, Berkley
2017 Bassmaster Elite Series Supporting Sponsors: T-H Marine, Shimano, Advance Auto Parts, Livingston Lures, Academy Sports + Outdoors, Carhartt, Dick Cepek Tires & Wheels, Lowrance, Phoenix Boats
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VanDam’s 18 pounds of disappointment
Be honest, if a genie in a bottle offered you an 18-pound limit of bass every time you went fishing, you’d jump on it like a 5-pound smallmouth on a soft shell crawdad.
So would I.
But for the greatest bass angler of all time, bringing an 18-pound limit of smallmouth to the scales on Day 1 of the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship on Lake Mille Lacs felt like Christmas without presents. Or, maybe a good old fashioned kick in the fishin’ shorts.
“Yea, absolutely I’d call it disappointing,” said Kevin VanDam in the predawn light just before heading out in search of a bigger sack of bronze bombers on Day 2.
“I actually caught more bass than I expected to yesterday, but so many of my bites yesterday were 2 or 2 ½ pound fish. I just never got a real big bite,” he explained.
Ironically, even though 29 of the 50 competitors caught at least a 20-pound limit on Day 1, nearly all of them still insist that Mille Lacs is fishing stingy.
“You look at that leaderboard, and you’re thinking we just went out there and blasted ‘em yesterday – but trust me, that ain’t the deal. It’s a grind. Even a lot of the guys who caught ‘em really good yesterday only got seven or eight bites all day long,” explains the career long Quantum pro.
“In my opinion, the population structure here is different than most northern smallmouth fisheries we compete on,” says VanDam. “Instead of tons of three and four pounders like you might see at a place like St. Clair or the St. Lawrence River, it seems like there are fewer fish here, but there’s some really old fish here that grow to be giants – there’s just not tons of them.”
But today is a brand new day. And boy is it different. Instead of calm winds and bright sunny skies, clouds are heavy grey and the winds are blowing steady out of the North-Northeast at 10 mph.
“You watch the leaderboard today,” warns VanDam. “This weather change is gonna shake things up big time. All that finesse fishing guys were doing yesterday, is going to be tougher to do today.”
Faster moving lures like jerkbaits, crankbaits and spinnerbaits will be much bigger players. And if VanDam had a genie in a bottle – that’s exactly what he’d wish for.
So keep an eye on the leaderboard. And don’t be shocked if the 7-time Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year makes a jump toward the top like a 5-pound smallie.
Oh Deer, Swindle a Bit Distracted as AOY Championship Begins
One year ago, the pressure Gerald and LeAnn Swindle felt during Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship week on Mille Lacs was on par with a Crimson Tide pass rush.
The couple persevered, they prayed, they leaned on each other, and they limped out of the pocket to score Gerald’s second career Toyota Angler of the Year title.
This week on Mille Lacs, the pressure is gone. So much so that LeAnn had to step through a line of fans and media at Day 1 launch to jokingly remind Gerald of their rule: “No talk of deer hunting on tournament day.”
Now don’t get the wrong idea, “Lulu” loves to hunt. But as she kindly explains, “He gets distracted easily, especially when deer season gets close to tournament season, so sometimes I have to step in and remind him of our rule, especially when I see him showing-off trail camera pictures five minutes before tournament blast-off.”
The couple has shared 13 great years of marriage, and time in the deer woods together is a treasured part of their matrimony. In fact, they stopped at the 200-acre hunting property they own in Illinois as they traveled from home in Alabama to Mille Lacs.
“Yep, I spent all last Thursday afternoon, and all day Friday, planting ‘green fields’ to get us ready for deer season, before we came on up to Mille Lacs,” says Swindle with a joyful grin.
“I was telling Dan Quinn from Rapala this morning not to get too concerned about not seeing a lot of deer on trail camera right now in September, because this time of year they’re still eating natural food sources, and they don’t come to food you put out in front of a camera near as much as they will later in the fall. They’re like smallmouth on a sonar screen. Sometimes they hug the bottom so close you can’t see ‘em – but that don’t mean they aren’t there,” explains the Quantum pro.
A couple weeks from now Swindle will kick off the hunting season with a Montana elk hunting trip, followed by time in a treestand for Illinois whitetail.
“The thing I’m looking forward to most this year in hunting season is not walking with a bad limp. I feel healthy. Heck, last year I had to kill a 140” buck with one crutch under my arm,” says Swindle.
But first, there is a bass tournament taking place in Central Minnesota. And this year, it’s a tournament the Swindles are enjoying far more.
“This week last year was the single most stressful week of our married life,” admits LeAnn. “There were tears, there were prayers, and there was stress like we’d never experienced.”
Jordan Lee and Casey Ashley Preview AOY Championship
Jordan Lee and Casey Ashley both sit inside the Top 10 of the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year points race, and the two Quantum pros graciously offered their input on everything from fried catfish to sturgeon, and of course smallmouth bass, on the eve of competition at Lake Mille Lacs.
Last year was a slugfest here at Mille Lacs. How do conditions compare this year?
Jordan Lee: The weather is a lot warmer. Last year we were wearing Carhartt beanies on our heads to stay warm, and the lake does seem to be fishing tougher.
Casey Ashley: It’s so much tougher this year. It’s like these fish got a good education between last year and now. There aren’t any dumb ones left swimming here now.
The Northern U.S. is rich with a wide variety of freshwater fish species. What’s your most noteworthy catch amid all the Elite Series events you’ve fished ‘up north’ this summer?
Jordan Lee: Oh, for sure the 60-pound sturgeon I fought for 71 minutes on Zona Live at Lake St. Clair!
Casey Ashley: I hooked a northern pike so big that I wasn’t about to wrestle him for my jerkbait. I just let him take it with him.
Speaking of lures, name three lures that pros will use most this week on Mille Lacs:
Jordan Lee: Jerkbait, drop shot, and a tube.
Casey Ashley: A crankbait that will run 10 to 12-feet deep, a jerkbait, and a drop shot.
How much weight will you have to average each day to finish in the Top 12 here?
Jordan Lee: 20 pounds
Casey Ashley: 20 pounds
People in this part of the country love to eat walleye, yellow perch and crappie – what is your favorite fish to eat?
Jordan Lee: I like walleye. And I like grouper. But my go-to standard is grilled catfish at the Cracker Barrel.
Casey Ashley: Fried flathead catfish caught near home in South Carolina.
Iaconelli: Last One Out, First One In
His Tundra’s tire tracks were barely dry on the boat ramp from the end of Tuesday’s extremely long practice day. But at 6:20 a.m. Wednesday, in the dark of pre-dawn, nearly 30 minutes before sunrise, Mike Iaconelli was the first pro back on the launch ramp at the Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year Championship on Lake Mille Lacs.
If you’re thinking this is a reflection of Iaconelli’s competitive way of trying to arrive earlier and stay later than his fellow pros, you’re off track. If anything, it’s simply a strong desire for self-improvement that motivates him to work as hard as possible. And most days, that involves launching in the dark, and fishing as late as the rules and available daylight will allow.
“There’s a little extra pressure to go and work hard here at Mille Lacs, because I need a Top 10 to make the Classic, but really this is the ‘go early and stay late’ routine I’ve had throughout my entire career,” says the 2006 Toyota Bassmaster Angler of the Year.
“I’m not saying I work harder than anybody else, but what I will tell you is that I don’t think I’m as naturally talented or gifted as guys like Aaron Martens, Kevin VanDam or even some of the young guys like Brandon Palaniuk – so I try to work extra hard, and put in as many hours as I possibly can, just to stay competitive against guys like them,” says Iaconelli in a voice rich with humility and respect.
Everybody has their own approach to practice. Steve Kennedy is known for sometimes trading time on the water during practice for quality time with his family, yet he’s had a great career. But Iaconelli learned very early in his career, that for him, an extra hour or two on the water in practice, can make a big difference in where he lands in the tournament standings.
“My first career pro win was a Bassmaster Top 150 on Lake Champlain in 1999 from a school of 3-pound smallmouth that I found in the final hour of practice, and that taught me how an extra hour or two in a practice day can make a huge difference,” he says.
Even with a stellar career in his rearview mirror, Iaconelli continues to be his own toughest motivator. And in a tournament where anything less than a Top 10 will likely break his streak of 16 straight Classic qualifications – don’t be surprised if he’s the last one to leave the lake from practice Wednesday afternoon.