Mark Tyler turned in a clutch performance in mid-July, finishing 4th at the Champlain Bassmaster Elite Series to get back into Bassmaster Classic contention. The first half of the season had been mediocre, at best, for the Bass Cat and Mercury pro.
He'd hoped to carry that momentum through the final part of the season, but it didn't happen. He finished near the bottom of the field in each of the last four events (two regular-season tournaments and two majors) and ended up 64th in the points – far below the 37th-place Classic qualification cutoff.
Part of the reason for his lackluster stretch run could be attributed to homesickness. The lifelong West Coast resident never went home to Arizona after the circuit left the southwest.
"At the time I didn't think that was (the problem)," he said. "I felt like I was working as hard and trying as hard as ever.
"I don't want to point to any one thing as an excuse, but there was some intangible missing. I've thought about it a lot, and it sure wasn't pleasant. It was a miserable couple of months."
He'll get home more often in 2007. He recently bought a 290-acre spread off Interstate 40 near Vian, Okla. that'll be more centrally located to the places his schedule takes him.
"It's on a good travel corridor – I'm on and off I-40 quite a bit. I moved right after the season and I'm still not settled in.
"It's a little more than I was looking for, but I had to take what I could get. The location and everything else was right."
The new place will give him two distinct advantages he's never before enjoyed during his 5-year tour career: He'll get home a lot more often during the season, and he's within a few hours drive of several of the lakes on the Elite Series schedule, so he can fish them during the offseason.
"I couldn't go on being away from my house for 6 months at a time," he said. "This year in particular, that really started to get to me. I knew if I was going to continue to do the tour, I'd have to make the move.
"If you're going to fish at the top level, you need to spend that kind of time on the lakes out here. I didn't have that option sitting in Arizona."
He'll park his boat in a different garage, but it'll be the same model he's run for the past several years – a Bass Cat Cougar FTD.
"I enjoy staying in the same model because I can just roll all my stuff over into the next boat," he said. "What I like best about the Cougar is the nice, large, square storage in the front. I use Plano boxes, and they all stack in there nice and square.
"You can get a lot of tackle in there, and being well-organized is very important to me."
