A New Plan for 2019
The McMillan brothers are taking on the world together
If you haven’t been living under a rock this offseason then you know there are going to be some well-known faces missing from the FLW Tour next year. Over the years, my brother Jared and I have run a lot with the Johnston brothers, Jeff “Gussy” Gustafson and Jeff Sprague, and now they’ve all switched to fishing other circuits. It’s like high school again. At least, that’s the best analogy I can find: You grew up with the same buddies, but after you graduate you go your separate ways. I’m really sad about it.
I didn’t get a call to fish anywhere else, but I was probably not going to leave anyway. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave my brother. He’s got the potential to make it in this game, and he’s 21 years old. I didn’t want him out on his own. We’re a whole lot better off together.
The disappointing thing is I’m not going to get to see Gussy and Sprague. We all got around a lot together.
A new approach to practice
The last few years, Gussy and I have shared everything, and we got to be a pretty good team. Replacing that is impossible, so it’s going to be just Jared and me doing it together next year.
There’s no one that will be able to do the same stuff that Gussy and I did, and it’s not going to be worth getting into bed with someone else and going through the growing pains. It would be different if Jared wasn’t out there with me, but with him there I’m not even going to attempt to do it.
What made Gussy and I so different is that Gussy always did his thing, which was completely different from how I approached the lake. But, at the end of the day, it was really my job to find a way to catch a couple of good ones throughout the day and his job to find a way we could catch a limit. He was good at that. I was good at getting three bites that might weigh 10 pounds, but I could never catch the other two 14-inch spots I needed to get me over the hump.
Jared was kind of the wild card this season. We turned him loose and let him do whatever he wanted to do. Hopefully, at some point throughout the year, he would find something really special off the beaten path. Something that only a rookie would find.
Jared and I have chatted about it the last couple weeks and decided that next year we’re going to have to do stuff a little bit different. But, I think the lakes we’re going to are going to suit us a little better than they did in 2018. On most of the lakes we should be able to power fish and sight-fish and fish shallow. We don’t have any of those deep spot lakes like we did last season. Heck, come Champlain, where Gussy would really help us, there’s a better-than-average chance there’ll be plenty of smallmouths lying around on beds.
Rayburn is a wild card, but if we can get past Rayburn we’ll get two in our backyard – Toho and Seminole – that we’ve fished all our lives. It could be really good, or we could get our butts whipped.
More family time in 2019
Last year Jared and I roomed with Gussy, Matt Stefan, Mark Fisher and sometimes the Johnston brothers. That’s probably going to change up this year.
Bri (my wife) is going to come to the majority of the tournaments, and with our little boy with us, it’s probably going to be just the McMillans. I don’t want to book a couple houses and have two roommates and have my boy wake up at 3 a.m., then have nobody want to room with us.
We’ll probably just book some cheaper houses that are good for two or three people and that’ll be that.
One thing is, when you room with somebody you can’t help but talk fishing with them. And, like I said before, I really don’t want to get in with somebody new. So, I think that’s probably the better way to handle it. It’ll just be me and Jared on the road, taking on the FLW Tour together.