By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor
Kevin Van Dam holds quite a few professional bass fishing records that will likely never be broken. Brandon Palaniuk has a pretty decent shot at taking down one of them.
VanDam won seven Bassmaster Elite Series events from 2006, when the tour was launched, through his final season on the circuit it 2018. With his victory last week at Lake Okeechobee, Palaniuk now has six Elite trophies.
Is the Idahoan focused on reaching and eventually surpassing KVD's standard? Uh, not really.
"I always want to win every single one of them," the two-time Bassmaster Angler of the Year said. "But for me, at this stage of my career, it's not about chasing the trophies and wins. It's more about enjoying the journey.
"Every win has its own story and circumstances that make it special. It's certainly nice to get one only two events into a new season. It's also good to get the Florida monkey off my back – Okeechobee has historically been a nemesis for me throughout my career. I've never liked fishing in crowds and it took me quite a while to realize that if you're not around crowds in Florida, you're probably not around bass."
He obliterated the field at the Big O, winning by a margin of 15 pounds, 13 ounces over runner-up John Garrett. He exploited one small area in a canal that featured a ridge, a drain and a riprap bank that served as a waystation for big fish with spawning on their minds that were headed for skinny water.
He shared miniscule hotspot with fellow Top-10 finishers Will Davis Jr. (4th) and Greg DiPalma (7th), and another check-casher – 38th-place Tim Dube. When all of them were there, the quartet fished in extremely close proximity to each other.
"We were literally boat to boat," Palaniuk said. "We were nearly touching the whole time and a lot of the time we were making the same cast. When DiPalma caught his 8-10, my bait landed not six inches from where his did at the exact same time, and right then Dube caught a 6-pounder on the other side of me.
"Still, it seemed incredibly relaxed, in a way almost like I was fishing in a team tournament. They're not guys I talk to during practice, but when I showed up on Day 1, I was like 'Okay, these are the other guys who found it.' They'd all gotten there before me (due to him having a higher boat number for that day's launch) and they just told me to come on in and we'd figure it out."
They ended up getting along famously for the duration of the derby, often sharing baits and pointing out casting angles.
"If they'd told me to stay out on that first day, then I'd have been there first on Day 2 (because of the inverted boat order) and I'd have had to tell them no," he said. "That would've changed the whole dynamic of the tournament for me.
"I'll cooperate with anybody to try to make the most of a special situation like that. We can all have a good event if we work together, but as soon as someone starts trying to screw over someone else, it creates hostility, and that's not good for anybody."
DiPalma led Day 1 with a 29-12 stringer, but Palaniuk took charge of the event with a career-best 34-10 haul on Day 2. That bag featured two fish that weighed more than 9 pounds each and another in excess of 7.
He had all of his weight by 1 p.m., which was a full two hours before he had to be back at the ramp.
"For one thing, I just think a special group of fish showed up there that day," he said. "The other part of the equation was just bait selection."
He caught one of the 9s and the 7-plus on a massive Megabass Big M 4.0 crankbait, which measures five inches and weighs two ounces. The other 9 was enticed by a prototype Megabass crankbait.
"I didn't even have Big Ms in the boat on Day 1 and I didn't have Kanatas (a 6 1/3-inch Megabass jerkbait)," he said. "That was all stuff I put in after I saw what happened on Day 1. Having those bigger baits allowed me to get the bigger ones to trigger."
He'll now take an unwelcome hiatus from competition, as he'll sit out this year's Bassmaster Classic due to his career-worst 48th-place finish in last year's points standings. The Elite Series gets back in action April 10 at the Pasquotank River in North Carolina.
The win moved him up to 10th place in the AOY standings, but that list isn't much of a consideration here in March.
"There's a lot of casts and a lot of catches that have to happen between now and the end of the season," he said. "All I know is I'm off to a much better start than the previous seasons I won the AOY (2017 and 2022). Both times I won, it just kind of happened – it wasn't something I'd planned out or was really even trying to make happen. I just caught as much as I could every day and all of a sudden I was leading the points.
"I've never gotten caught up in points because I don't want to make decisions based on them. The best way to pile up points is just to catch as much as you can every day."
