By Todd Ceisner
BassFan Editor
(Editor's Note: In observance of the Thanksgiving holiday, a new First Cast feature story will not appear until Monday, Nov. 28. The BassFan staff would like to wish you all a joyous and relaxing Thanksgiving.)
Timmy Horton has been around long enough to know bass fishing, much like life, is more an endurance sport than anything else. Days are built cast by cast. Tournaments are constructed day by day. Seasons are the finished product, the pillars of a career.
Based on his results from recent seasons, some might conclude that Horton is slowing down, that the younger competitors who have infiltrated the Elite Series have passed him by. While he doesn’t subscribe to this theory, he’s well aware his performance lately has not been up to his lofty standards.
In 2016, he accumulated four finishes of 82nd or worse, including a dismal 106th at Wheeler Lake, a venue in his backyard where he’d hoped to contend for the win. When he drove south out of La Crosse, Wis., following the season finale at the Mississippi River, he was 84th in the Angler of the Year points, easily the worst showing of his career.
Prior to 2015, Horton’s last triple-digit finish in a B.A.S.S. event was in March 2005 when he was 117th at the Clarks Hill Bassmaster Tour. He has three such results in the last two seasons and didn’t mince words when asked to reflect on this past campaign.
“It was my toughest season ever,” Horton said while seated behind the wheel of his Nitro, basking in the sun on a textbook fall day at Smith Lake last month. “Just the bombs I had – Wheeler and a few others. They were impossible to overcome. It was a little bit of everything.”
He admits the inconsistencies on the water over the last couple of seasons began to erode his excitement about competing. Now, he says, he starting to feel the fire burn hotter again.
“You go from a point of making yourself go to work to being excited to go work like I was 11 years ago,” Horton said.
Wheels Fell Off at Wheeler
Horton called this year’s tournament at Wheeler a “strange ordeal.” He has tons of experience there – he lives in nearby Muscle Shoals – and figured some of his out-of-the-way areas would produce.
In the end, he tried to build his strategy around the Decatur Flats, a famed stretch of water that oozes prime habitat for bass. What he found was puzzling.
“It’s a mystery really,” he said. “Typically, you’re catching released fish there, but over the entire 10-mile stretch, you have divers now who are not finding mussel shells there anymore.
“I have so much history there, but when you get behind and figure, ‘I can find stuff offshore down the lake,’ you don’t think about going to the bank and catching what you can. I was too stubborn to do anything other than around the flats. Ultimately, that’s how it was won, but the fish were so few and far between there.”
As Good As It Gets
Horton is hoping he regains his competitive his edge in 2017. He’ll have to in order to keep pace with his contemporaries. As someone with more than 200 B.A.S.S. tournaments under his belt, he’s witnessed the passing of the torch from era to era and now he believes the Elite Series is as strong as any field he’s gone up against.
“I see the group I came in with – Aaron (Martens,) Edwin (Evers), Greg (Hackney) and Skeet (Reese),” he said. “There was a time in my career for 10 years that that was right there on par and sometimes even better. That moves me. When you look at guys like Denny (Brauer) and (Larry) Nixon, there’s something that comes together in your 40s. You still have the energy and all the knowledge you’ve gained. I’m excited about where we are.”
He says he sensed he was getting back on track toward the end of the season – he was 32nd at the Potomac River – but he knows it’ll take time and a few successful tournament days to get the momentum going in the right direction again.
“The biggest thing – and I caught myself thinking about this toward the end of the season – is you realize it’s not a thing where you can snap fingers and get back to being competitive,” he said. “When I was catching them, it was a deal inside you like the sense of wonder of a kid where you’re looking forward to the next one. It’s like a kid walking into an amusement park and seeing the roller coaster. To feel that again is a neat feeling.
“If I’m having fun again, like at the end of last year, the rest will take care of itself,” he added. “I love being part of the group of guys and feeling ready to get out and enjoy a practice day and that feeling of dread when it’s time to go in.”
