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The Birth of a New Year
By
Jerry Corbett
 The
beginning of a new year for most tournament anglers begins with a
breath of cool crisp air, and the thoughts of how this year will be
the year. The one that most anglers dream about in their late night
slumber, having the hot-stick, and loading limits after limits of
bass into the boat for a little ride back to the weigh-in. Awe, if
it could only be that simple.
At the end of a long tournament season many anglers look
for a break from the demands and pressure of fishing a team
tournament circuit or pro/am trail, and begin to reflect on the
season. After the tournament fishing year is over if you don’t sit
down and go over in your mind or even on paper or over the phone
with a fishing buddy the things that worked and things that turned
out wrong, then you are definitely doing yourself a great
injustice. Most anglers will go through what they had planned for a
particular tournament and how the rights turned into wrongs and how
the approach to a certain body of water could have been better
implemented into a stronger finish. However, anglers should also
sit down at the end of the year and go through each tournament and
put them together and compile the entire fishing year. If you do a
self-assessment of the entire year and note how you fished over an
entire year, you will be better prepared for the upcoming season.
 Obviously,
individuals have a great variety of ways of getting away from the
demands of fishing, just to recharge the batteries for a while.
Many will hit the woods in search of deer and other type of game,
and even others will hit the waterways and ponds in search of ducks
and still others will look onto the open fields for huge flights of
geese. Again, many others might sit around and enjoy an afternoon
of football or basketball on the tube. You may find spending time
with your family or heading off to church is a good way to relax and
to refocus your fishing energy. All of these are great ideas, as
long as you feel you have had the opportunity to rest and balance
that desire of competitive fishing with the grueling affects of
spending a good chunk of the year on the front deck of a boat.
Once the holidays come and go and the frosty soil of
January waits below our feet, we begin to get that extra excitement
with the upcoming new year. The tournament schedules begin to take
shape and plans for another year are formed. By this time most of
us are chomping at the bit, and ready to get after it, in our
never-ending search for our little green friends. The new year
starts off a little slow, but with the ushering in of the boat shows
it won’t be long before the tournament season will be on its way.
 If you
have compiled a semi detailed self-assessment of the recently past
year and develop a decent understanding of how things could have
been different in the actions and decisions that you made the year
before, this can become a key ingredient in a successful new year.
When take the time to rest and relax and reacquire that clear
understanding of your goals and desires you can begin to picture
what you want to have happen in your next outing. And you should
also have some downtime to organize and inspect your fishing gear.
All of these items can be important ingredients in your
recipe for fishing success. Not one thing will automatically make
you a more successful angler after the birth of a new year, the only
way you can become more successful this year, is what decision you
make.
Take it easy, and good fishing!
Jerry Corbett
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