Syracuse.com - Volney angler has touch luck in national bass fishing tournament

[HuntingNY-News]

;"I will be back," he said. "Just being there was an accomplishment."

Dick Blume/The Post-StandardSteven Pickard wets his line on the Oneida River Friday.

Steven Pickard said sometimes when you compete in a bass tournament you can do little wrong and the fishing comes easy.

Other times, he noted, your best laid plans go awry and you can do little right.

He experienced the latter when he fished in the 2012 Cabela’s Bassmaster Federation Nation Championship on Alabama’s Wheeler Lake on Oct. 25-27. He was this state’s lone representative in a competition that featured the top anglers in the 20,000-member federation. Anglers came from across the country, as well as Japan, Zimbabwe and Mexico.

“Being in this tournament was the best, the furthest I’ve gone in my 15 years of competitive fishing,” said the 40-year-old Volney resident, who is a member of the Port City Bassmasters in Oswego. “I was literally one tournament away from qualifying for the Bassmaster Classic (with its $500,000 first prize).”

He finished 50th out of 56 anglers.

Pickard qualified for the nationals partially because of his finishes this year in the three-tournament N.Y. Bass Chapter Federation fishing trail, which had competitions on the St. Lawrence River, Cayuga Lake and Oneida Lake. He won the St. Lawrence event.

But the biggest factor was his seventh-place finish in September in the Cabela’s Bassmaster Federation Nation Eastern Divisional tournament on the Mystic and Charles rivers in Medford, Mass.

“I was the top individual from this state in that one. That’s what got me to the nationals,” he said.

The national tournament, he said, was an eye-opener. He got his hotel room and many of his meals for free. Representatives from boat and tackle companies handed out loads of free stuff. Each day, he got free gas for his boat.

Beforehand, Pickard took time off from his job as a project manager for a Liverpool engineering company to visit Wheeler Lake, which is actually a 70-mile stretch of the Tennessee River — a man-made waterway created by two dams. He talked to a couple of fishing buddies who had fished a tournament there recently and they pointed out several good spots.

In practice, the day before the competition started, he came across a stretch with lily pads that was loaded with big fish.

That first day, though, he came down with food poisoning. The second day, it turned into the flu.

What about those spots, the back-pocket areas and ponds off the river his buddies told him to fish?

“Well the lake level had gone down so much I couldn’t get my boat back to them,” he said.

What about that prime stretch of lily pads?

“It just turned off. I fished it for two straight days, hoping it would turn around. I had 13 rods in the boat and threw everything at them. I wasted too much time.”

Making matters worse, he said, after two days of 80-degree weather, a cold front came in on the final day and dropped the temperatures into the low 50s and put the brakes on the bass bite. The eventual winner was Mark Dove, of Indiana, who won a boat/motor/trailer rig valued at $53,465, as well as entry into the Bassmaster Classic and eligibility to compete in the 2013 Bassmaster Elite Series.

Pickard remains undaunted.

“I will be back,” he said. “Just being there was an accomplishment.”

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog