What a busy couple of weeks! The beginning of January always seems to blindside me. I'm trying to get my bearings at school, trying to make the best of the first tournaments of the year and getting all my other business in line.

Usually it isn’t all that bad. After all, most tournaments usually don’t start until later in the month, which usually gives me a buffer between the beginning of school and the beginning of the season. But that wasn’t the case this year. I’ve had an event every weekend, including a BFL on Jan. 14 and my last FLW College Fishing qualifier on Jan. 21, both of which were on the Big “O” (Lake Okeechobee).

The Baffling BFL

Despite the reports of giant bags being caught, my practice for the BFL consisted of 15- to 24-pound, which was pretty mediocre at the time. I found the fishing to be a bit spotty and it was hard to find something solid.

I practiced about a 6 days and I figured out that my best shot was to flip matted hydrilla and hyacinth in the Monkey Box area. I had actually found a really good stretch that was rather long, that held really good-quality fish the week before the tournament, so I was pretty confident that if the weather was going to be as bad as it was supposed to, I would produce rather well.

As the tournament got closer and I saw the weather was going to get colder and more nasty, I felt even more confident in what I had found, since the mats were adjacent to prominent spawning flats. I felt the cold front would not only keep the fish already in those mats stationary, but also draw some other fish previously on the spawning flats into the heavy cover to weather the storm.

Expecting relatively tough fishing, I got off the water early during my Friday practice period, since I got the right bites to compile a 15-pound bag. I honestly thought would be decent given the conditions.

I normally wouldn’t get off the water early, but since I expected it to be tough, and I knew I could catch fish in my spots, I felt that spreading myself too thin would work against me, so I took the "less is more" approach. I also thought I was coming down with a cold (turned out to be allergies) and needed extra rest.

The tournament day started out as slow, as I had expected. The 20-plus mph winds and the upper-30 degree temperatures, in my mind, would surely kill the bite, so I was content with my slow but steady progress. I even got into a bit of a groove, catching three keepers on three consecutive pitches. I thought I was the man!

I ended up culling quite a few times and even caught one that went about 6 pounds.

The bite nose-dived at about 2:00 and I ended up making a bad move to another spot further south, but I felt I had a decent limit. Looking back, I kind of laugh at myself.

Many of you can relate to this:

It was like one of those times when you think you have a “decent” bag –even though you are kind of proud of your catch, you want to sound disappointed to your friends. So you're talking with your buddies at the bag-line and they ask you: “How did you do?” and you reply, “Man it was tough for me! I only have ... "

Now, deep down you are still proud because you still think you have a decent sack of fish and you cant wait for your buddy to say: “Dang! That’s not that bad for today! You’ll still get a check!”

Yeah, that wasn’t what they said when I told them I had about 12 pounds! It was more like, “Oh, man, that stinks.”

My heart sank! Nobody was there to tell me I did okay. Instead, I all could hear was the weighmaster’s voice calling out one 20-pound-plus sack of fish after another. I ended up finishing 46th out of 200 with 12 pounds even.

I still don’t know why those fish bit so well on a day when the water temp dropped so much, but I did learn that you should never assume that fishing will be tough on the Big “O”, or any lake for that matter, because you could become complacent and miss out on a great bite.



Redemption

I was still a little rattled from the BFL as the FLW College event approached. I was still amazed that the fishing was as good as it was, and was disappointed that I made the mistake of assuming the opposite.

I did make a couple trips to other lakes around my area, just to have fun, catch fish, and clear my head. I even took my friend Bob Izumi out fishing on a local “sink-hole” chain and filmed an episode of his Real Fishing show. We ended up slaying them on Alabama Rigs – combined, we had close to 27 pounds and I ended up catching an 8-pound brute. Too much fun!

As the tournament drew and I saw what the EverStart event was taking to win – which was much less than I thought – my partner Casey and I started to make up our strategy (since there is no practicing for the FLW College events).

We decided on an area that I had found 3 weeks earlier while I was covering water quickly on the north end with an Ouzo Rip-Tail Minnow. It was an area that normally people would pass over, but since I was moving so fast with the Rip-Tail, I just kept on fishing and found some good fish in some really ugly water. It was an area that the local officials were spraying the grass and all the hyacinth was dying. I knew most people would avoid it in the EverStart, which was important for us, since we needed an area that wouldn’t get pressured too much.

The actual day of the tournament went about as well as I had hoped. Though we had two smaller fish that we would've liked to have culled out, we had fished flawlessly and hadn’t lost anything that would've helped.

We spent the whole day flipping that dying hyacinth with punching rigs and casting a Secret Lures MVP flipping jig around isolated “bean” bushes. My biggest fish weighed just about 5 pounds.

I was pretty stoked to get back on the FLW College Fishing stage. I did, however, feel a little out of place because I wasn’t able to wear my tournament jersey, due to a new college club rule. But I tried my best to represent my sponsors – even if I was just wearing a T-shirt, and corduroys. Yes, corduroys! People do still wear them.

We weighed – get this – 12 pounds even, exactly the same amount I had weighed the week before at the BFL. But luckily this time the conditions were actually tough.

We got to sit on the “hot seat” for a bit, which was cool, but the inevitable happened and we were bumped down two spots to finish the event in 3rd – well within the Top-5 cut to qualify for the Regional Championship.

Catching Up

Now I have a welcomed little break for a week or 2, when I get to catch up on the schoolwork I've been neglecting. Though my performance in the BFL wasn’t what I was hoping for, I'm very relieved that I re-qualified for the college regional again this year.

I really hope to do well there. too, and make it back to the “big show” in FLW College Fishing.

Oh, and by the way, from now on I plan to regularly link videos relevant to what I write about in these columns, and for this article I did a short video on mine and Casey's experience at the FLW College event. Click here to watch it.

Miles "Sonar" Burghoff is a student at the University of Central Florida and the winner of the 2011 BoatUS Collegiate Bass Fishing Championship. He's an aspiring professional angler who writes a regular column for BassFan. To visit his website, click here.