Mike Iaconelli - Fishing on the Edge: Hes Not Your Fathers Fisherman

CONTENTS

THIS BOOKis dedicated to my family. Thanks Mom, Uncle Don, Gram, and Pop for helping me become the man I am today. Because of you, I've been able to turn my childhood hobby and passion into a fulltime dream job. You always believed in me and gave me the confidence that I could do anything in life I wanted to. And to my two girls, Drew and Rylie. I love you more than anything in this world. Follow your heart and strive to achieve your dreams. And remember, never give up!

THE BREAKING
POINT

Everyone has his passion. His calling. His purpose in life. For as long as I can remember, mine has always been fishing. Nothing except the love of my family has ever given me more joy. The art of finding and landing fish. Beating them in their environment. From the moment I dropped a line into the water as a toddler, everything in my life had been steered down a single path: making a living as a professional bass fisherman. In 1999, after years of grinding it out on the amateur level, my dream became a reality. I filed the paperwork with BASS (Bass Anglers Sportsman Society), the granddaddy of bass fishing tournament organizations, and jumped into the fire. Almost immediately, I won the Vermont BASS Top 150 Pro Tour on Lake Champlain, beating fishing legend (and my hero) Rick Clunn by almost two pounds. Even better than pocketing $100,000, more money than I had ever seen at once in my life, I knew I had arrived, that I was really and truly living my dream. I was on top of the world, and thought I'd stay there forever.

Fast-forward to March 2003. The high was long gone and I had become a mental train wreck. I was toast! Fried! Why? My marriage was over, and that was all I could think about. I was sleeping no more than two hours a night, I couldn't eat, and I couldn't sleep. Even worse, it felt like fishing was the reason my marriage had crumbled. Being a professional angler is a huge time commitment. All of that attention put towards fishing had always been a sore spot between me and my soon-to-be-ex-wife, Kristi. My travel demands meant I was away from her and my daughters, Drew and Rylie, for days, weeks, sometimes months on end. Even when I was home, I had to spend time on research, and maintaining and preparing my gear. I've always said that dedication and hard work, not natural talent, allowed me to succeed, so I never allowed myself to let up for one second. That created even more distance between me and Kristi. Everything had come to a head and our relationship had, sadly, reached the breaking point.

A time line of mistakes, consequences, and guilt kept racing through my mind. I told myself, If you were a normal Joe, none of this would have happened.... You wanted it all.... You just had to be a professional angler! It felt like every bad thing that had happened to me was because of fishing. Of course, I was ignoring the zillions of positives, which had always outweighed the bad, but by now my mind was Swiss cheese. I decided I had to make some radical changes in my life. Salvaging my marriage wasn't even the issue. I knew Kristi and I were getting divorced. But I couldn't go through this kind of pain again. I had to give myself a normal life so I wouldn't ruin my next relationship. After months of thinking it over, I finally came to a decision I never thought I'd make.

I'd quit fishing for good.

I was dead serious. I was gone. Out. I had made up my mind, and anyone who knows me will tell you that when my mind's made up, there's no changing it. My family knew that, so when I told them, they asked me only one simple questionAre you sure? Fishing had been my number one passion my whole life, so they wanted to be certain I had thought through what it meant to quit, but I was too depressed for sensible meditation. Fishing had wrecked my personal life, and I wanted out. It happens to tons of anglers. Pete Gluszek, my best friend and roommate on tour, had watched relationships with his ex-wife and a recent girlfriend land in the toilet. For many guys, that's the unfortunate reality of the sport. But I always thought Kristi and I were different, that we'd be the exception to the rule.

Try to picture this, though: I'd never experienced life without fishing being front and center. In my first memories, I have a rod in my hands. As a kid, my summers revolved around trips to the Poconos, where I caught trout, sunfish, and, eventually, my first bass. I collected Bassmaster magazines the way most kids collected baseball cards. After I graduated from Triton High School in Runnemede, New Jersey, I was more concerned about starting my fishing club, Top Rod Bassmasters, than enrolling in college. When I eventually earned my degree, I had done it by cramming for tests in between fishing pro-am tournaments. It didn't matter what I was doing, or where life had taken me. Fishing always found its place in the mix. I couldn't imagine it any other way.

Plus, I was living the life most fishermen would kill for. My career earnings were well into six figures. I was being sponsored by some of the biggest names in the business. Ranger Boats. Yamaha (outboard motors). Team Daiwa (rods and reels). Stren (fishing line). Owner (hooks). Fitovers Eyewear. Mann's Bait Company. Dick's Sporting Goods. You could count the number of years I'd been a pro on one hand and still have a finger left over, yet I'd already won three times on the BASS tour. Some guys fish as a pro for twenty years without winning even one. After years of scratching and clawing, I had made it. Yet there I was, ready to go back to my old job running the fishing department at Dick's Sporting Goods in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, while I completed a post-baccalaureate teaching program at Rowan University. I'd already ordered the paperwork for school. I'd moved on. That seemed like the only answer to my problems.

But I still had a grand vision. I didn't want to just crawl away from the sport that I'd loved so much and had shaped my life. I wanted to go out in style, and there was no better way than winning the last tournament I'd ever fish: the 2003 Citgo Bassmaster Classic, down in the Louisiana Delta near New Orleans. The Bassmaster Classic has always been the Super Bowl of bass fishing. No event even comes close, so it was the perfect send-off. This wasn't about nostalgia, though. I was no Ray Bourque, who played twenty-one seasons in the NHL before finally winning a Stanley Cup in 2001 and going out a champ. Give me a break! Fishing had turned its back on me and robbed me blind, so I wanted to squeeze every last drop I could from it. I was going to grab this title and then tell the entire sport to kiss off!

When June rolled around, which was a month before the Classic, I drove to the Big Easy with my uncle Don for the official six-day practice period. To me, this research and preparation time, during which I would break down the five hundred thousand fishable acres of the Delta and settle on a strategy, would make or break my entire tournament. Once those six days were over, anglers wouldn't be allowed near the tournament waters until the event started. So I needed to make each one count. Unfortunately, by the fifth day, I felt absolutely defeated because I wasn't anywhere near the fish.

It was frustrating, because even though I was quitting afterward, I had done the same homework for this tournament that I would for any other. I pored over maps and did hours upon hours of Internet research. I scoured my old