Wilks' Comeback Season Has Been Quiet, But Strong

With a best finish of 15th in nine events, Dustin Wilks hasn't done anything that's raised a lot of eyebrows in his return to the Bassmaster Elite Series. But the veteran from North Carolina has no complaints about the way his season has unfolded.

"It's been good," he said. "Everything's been really smooth and I've only made a couple of mistakes all year. Everything seems to be just flowing along and I'm catching fish when I need to catch them."

BassFans will recall that he missed all of the 2007 campaign and all but the first event of 2006 due to an ailing elbow on his casting arm. Two operations later (the first was an abysmal failure and the second merely undid what was done in the first), the joint, now supported by scar tissue, is nearly as good as new, and he's fishing about as well as he ever has.

He expected to encounter some physical limitations this year, but that hasn't been the case.

"I originally thought I'd never be able to throw a swimbait again, but I can do it and it doesn't hurt at all," he said. "I exercise and ice the elbow every night as a precaution, but it hasn't affected a single decision I've made this year – except maybe washing my boat.

"Sometimes I think if I were to get up there and start scrubbing on that boat, the elbow just wouldn't be able to take it," he added with a laugh.

In the Groove

Wilks started his comeback year with an 88th-place finish at Florida's Harris Chain, but he's fared no worse that 52nd since. He's cashed seven checks and occupies the No. 18 slot in the Angler of the Year (AOY) race, which means he's a virtual lock for the 2009 Classic.

Obviously, there wasn't much of a re-learning curve.

"It was pretty much right back into the swing of things," he said. "But I'm feeling a little older because there's so many new faces. I didn't know about 40 of the guys, and I still haven't met some of them.

"One thing that's been surprising is the weights at all the tournaments – it's amazing what it's taken just to make the Top 50. I don't know if it's timing or if the (anglers) are better or what, but these guys can certainly catch them good."

Things have gone so well that he has set a personal objective for the final two events of the season on the smallmouth-rich waters of lakes Erie and Oneida in upstate New York.

"I want to move into the Top 10 in the points. I'm in 18th now, so it might take one Top 12 or a couple of Top 25s to get there.

"I love smallmouths – they're my favorite fish of all time. It's just that sometimes me and big water don't get along too well."

Won't Look Too Far Ahead

Wilks said that a strong determination to focus on the here and now has helped him this year. There's been no perusing the schedule and trying to figure out what fish at a particular venue would be doing a month and a half down the road.

"It's been a year where I've just taken each tournament one at a time," he said. "I haven't thought about too much ahead of time, I haven't done a lot of mapwork and I haven't talked to people. And once that one was over, it was, 'Okay, where are we going next?'''

When asked to pinpoint one highlight of the season thus far, he looked to day 3 of the hawg-fest at Texas' Falcon Lake. He just barely made the Top-50 cut with with a 25-pound-per-day average over the first 2 days, and then caught 32 pounds to move up 29 places to 17th.

"I probably caught 40 fish over 4 pounds that day – it was just incredible," he said. "I was culling 5-pounders by about 10:00.

"It was my biggest bag ever, and I caught it by flipping bushes, which was different from what everybody else was doing. That made it that much more fun."

Like everyone who fishes at the sport's top level, he hopes his future includes both a Bassmaster Classic victory and an AOY. But after what he's been through, he won't dwell on those lofty ambitions.

"I'm just so happy to be able to come back. I'm going to try to keep taking the individual events as they come because that seems to be working."

Notable

> Wilks said the only thing he can't do with his casting arm that he could before is turn the palm of his hand face-up. "But I can compensate for that with my shoulder, so I can still get change at a store," he said.

> He's been a smallmouth aficionado since he was a kid – his family took weeklong annual trips to some small lakes in Ontario, Canada. "That's when I got hooked on them. We fished out of 12-foot wooden boats and at first we just had oars, but it didn't take us long to figure out that we needed trolling motors."

> He was sick and missed almost all of the practice period for the opener at the Harris Chain, so he just went with the same things he did on his last visit. "It wasn't a bad move – I was around some big fish, but I didn't put them in the boat in that tournament. I lost a 7-pounder and a 3 on the first day, and those two would've put me right up there."