Martens pleased to overcome last year’s difficulties
Story
by Pete Robbins
Posted
- June 28th, 5:44am CST
Leeds, Ala. – For Aaron Martens, 2010 was nearly a repeat of 2009, and not in a good way.
Heading into the last event of the 2009 Elite Series regular season, Martens found himself in 5th place overall, but a disastrous finish at Oneida dropped him down to 16th and therefore out of the inaugural post-season. It was a tough pill to swallow.
“It was just bad luck,” he said. “When we got to (the Mississippi River in) Iowa it was just enormous. I don’t get any information at all and it wasn’t what I expected. I still wasn’t worried going to Oneida, but for the first time I went for largemouths and smallmouths ruled for the first time in a long time.”.
Photos
by Mark Jeffreys & Matt Pangrac
He headed home to Alabama, but not as a competitor.
It was strange territory for Martens, who has consistently been at the top of the tour level heap. In 2008, he finished 16th after a string of four straight top sixes, including an Angler of the Year title in 2005. This year, he headed into the final event in 9th and slid as far as possible without going outside the post-season cut. He finished the year in a tie for 11th with a surging Russ Lane, 34 points ahead of Brian Snowden in 13th.
Martens was pleased to overcome last year’s difficulties, but the laid back California native didn’t stress about what would have happened otherwise. “If I didn’t make it I was excited about fishing the US Open in Las Vegas,” he said. “That’s a really fun tournament and I feel like I have a good chance to win.”
Fort Gibson Fun
While Martens had a decent practice on the rapidly rising Arkansas River, he wasn’t thrown off kilter by the move to Ft. Gibson. In fact, he relished it.
“It’s one of the neatest places I’ve ever been,” he said. “There’s a ton of bait and a ton of fish. It laid out really nice. You could catch them shallow or deep. I didn’t fish offshore but I’d like to go back and do that.”
The result of his quick study was a 24th place finish, which in many years might have moved him up on the leaderboard, but the fact that numerous anglers ahead of him finished even higher meant that Martens moved down. Still it was enough to keep on going.
It was a strange year for Martens. He earned six checks in eight events, including back-to-back 6th place finishes at Smith Mountain and Pickwick, but he struggled where you’d least expect that to happen. He came in 54th at the California Delta, where he won the 2007 Elite Series tournament, and he came in 57th at Guntersville, where he won in 2009. His third worst finish, 38th, occurred at Clear Lake, where he’d previously won a Bassmaster Open.
“It’s not like I laid off and didn’t fish hard,” he said. “I just made poor decisions. At the Delta I found the area it was won on but I left too soon. The tide was really important there. Nothing clicked to me. Then the second day I just went to a bad area. I found them but didn’t give them a second chance. That’s part of fishing.”
At Guntersville his timing was similarly off. “I fished the wrong schools,” he said. “On Day One I didn’t go to my best spots first because I was worried that I’d find four or five guys there the next day. When I got there, the two guys sitting on it both had about 28 pounds.”
He remains an iconoclast and believes he is one of the few that does not seek out information about the waters from friends and acquaintances. “It’s tough know,” he said. “The guys know so much about the fisheries. I still don’t get any info. I don’t even research the lakes ahead of time. That probably hurts me.”
Pushing On to Alabama
Martens admitted that he’s not a huge fan of the post-season format. “For someone like Skeet it’s probably a little unfair,” he said.
Still, it is what it is, and while he hasn’t examined how the points will be distributed, he assumes that it “gives more guys a fighting chance to win Angler of the Year,”
although it would take “an act of God” for him to make up the deficit with Reese and not have someone else ahead of him stake claim to the title.”
Because the two tournament venues are close to his Alabama home, he’s spent some time on them of late. He noted that saw several members of the competition on his scouting trips to the Alabama River, which he likes, but he’d spend time on Jordan whether he’d qualified for the post-season or not.”
“I go there three times a year to fish for fun,” he said. “I pick it a lot over Guntersville because I love to fish for those big spots.”
Even if he can’t claim his second AOY title, his mastery of the largemouth’s spotted cousin makes him a potential spoiler next month. Furthermore, while he believes that the AOY title is the hardest to achieve and most prestigious among the anglers, it’s a Classic that’s on his mind. He’s fished 11 of them, including seven in a row, with three heartbreaking runner-up finishes to his credit. “Those three seconds make you want it bad,” he said.
