By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor
It never seemed as if the 2023 Bassmaster Elite Series season was destined to go down as one of Scott Martin's best professional campaigns. Through the first four regular-season events, he logged three solid-if-unspectacular finishes (30th, 26th and 30th) along with one semi-bomb (73rd).
Still, he was 26th in the Angler of the Year points race and well within the cutoff (Top 40) to make his third consecutive Bassmaster Classic since returning to the circuit via the 2020 Opens. Winning that event – an accolade that eluded his legendary father Roland – was his primary motivation for coming back to the organization with which he launched his tour-level career in 1998.
Then came the derbies at Lay Lake and the Sabine River in May and June, where he finished 90th and 94th, respectively, in a field of 104 anglers. He starts the home stretch of three Northern tournaments this week at No. 64 in the points, meaning he's got some serious work to do in order to be among the field for next year's Classic at Oklahoma's Grand Lake.
The 47-year-old Martin, who has more than $3 million in career earnings, said there's no common thread that ran through the Lay and Sabine tournaments and led to such low finishes.
"Lay Lake was a tale of lost opportunities – it was one of those deals where I should've had a much better finish that that," he said. "The second day was a trainwreck – I had good fish hooked and I was kneeling and ready to land them, and they just jumped off. It was like The Twilight Zone.
"On the other hand, the Sabine was a calculated gamble, but I made a huge mistake."
His error was calculating the daily tidal fluctuations in his head rather than checking the chart for Day 1. It wasn't until he'd made the long run to the Houston area, where he'd found some quality fish in practice (by that venue's standards, anyway) under low-tide conditions, that he realized the day would feature a "flat tide." It crested at 10 o'clock and remained at that level for 6 hours – long past the time when he had to start the journey back to Orange, Texas.
"I've fished tides a bunch and I've won on tidal fisheries," he said. "My mistake was that I didn't look at that chart on the first day of practice. I caught two small fish and then I never had another bite. I was stuck there – you can't rebound from a 200-mile run. I was praying to scratch out 6 or 7 pounds just to survive."
His two dinks weighed in at a measly 1-12. The tide was back to normal the following day and he went back to try to salvage some points, but could only manage a bag in the 8-pound range.
"That was just me not doing my research and it's a lesson that shouldn't have to have been learned 20-something years in," he said. "I should've verified, checked and double-checked."
The former FLW Tour AOY and FLW Cup champion has long been a competitor who could be counted on to follow up a bad showing with a good one – you have to go back well over a decade to find another instance in which he was so close to the bottom of the standings sheets in consecutive events.
He'll try to get things straightend out in this week's event at Lake St. Clair. After that, it'll be off to Lake Champlain, where the Floridian won three times during his long, illustrious stint with FLW, before the season wraps up at the St. Lawrence River.
"I'm confident that I can get things to swing back around in these next couple of events," he said. "I've got a lot of things to prove to myself on a personal level and I have to get up there and make it happen and right the ship.
"I plan to fish calculated and smart. I'm not going to take any huge gambles, but I'm not going to throw any layups, either."
