When I was in high school, I had a miraculous experience that would forever shape my life for the better: I met Aaron Martens.
I grew up watching Aaron on the Bassmaster Elite Series shows. Aaron had always been a television superhero to me – a fishing superstar on screen. How I met him was a small miracle on its own.
I just happened to go to the same high school in Birmingham, Ala., as Jordan Martens – Aaron’s daughter. She was a member of the high school fishing team. Her team fishing partner was my cousin, Sadie. I was on the high school fishing team too. I loved bass fishing, and at times, even thought about the possibilities of fishing for a living.
One day, Aaron came to a high school fishing meeting with Jordan, and I got to meet him. It sort of blew me away to be standing there next to the Aaron Martens. I don’t know how big my eyes were when I shook his hand that day, but I’m sure they were like golf balls. To say I was starstruck would be an understatement.
Because of Aaron’s involvement with the high school fishing club, I got to spend some time around him. We became friends. He invited me to go fishing with him several times, and we eventually became close friends. I thought I wanted to fish for a living, and being around Aaron removed all doubt. He inspired me to truly make professional bass fishing my career path.
People who never had the privilege to meet Aaron sometimes ask me about the things I learned from him. I learned so much about fishing and life from Aaron, it’s hard to cover it all. But there are a few things that stand out.
Above all, Aaron’s biggest impression on me was very simple: have fun fishing.
“Just have fun with it,” he told me.
“Things are not always going to go your way, but you need to have a good attitude about it,” he said. Aaron truly lived that motto; he always had fun with the process of fishing. His happiness was contagious, and I wanted to be like that.
At the time, I had no idea that his advice would ring so true. Professional fishing can be brutal. Bad days happen. Stuff breaks, fish come off, terrible weather rolls in, things go wrong. But even when things do not go as “planned,” and the chips are down, you have to take it in stride and keep your chin up. Aaron always focused on the small gems and blessings he observed during a fishing day, especially in the natural world around him. Those small gifts were always bigger than the biggest problems. He was the best at seeing life in that way.
Inside the boat, Aaron taught me how to pay critical attention to electronics, especially with sidescan. He taught me to have a curiosity about what the screens were revealing in the underwater world. He was always aware of the tiny details electronics provided. He graphed a lot, spending hours idling behind his units. He broke the traditional mold that “practice” meant just casting and reeling. At times, he would spend large amounts of time graphing instead of fishing. He realized covering water with electronics could actually be far more efficient than fishing during practice. These days, seeing guys idle for extensive amounts of time is not that surprising. Aaron was always ahead of the curve on things like that.
In addition, his ability to read contours on digital mapping was uncanny. He had a specific eye for the way contours spread out. He avoided the obvious contours everyone else fished and instead explored the subtle ones. He loved idling and searching for obscure areas that held groups of untapped fish.
Aaron was also the first angler I knew of to put a sidescan transducer on a trolling motor, before forward-facing sonar, or even 360. The number of extra fish he caught because he noticed something out to the side of the boat was amazing. He was always thinking outside the box like that. I absorbed as much of that mindset as I could from him.
Aaron taught me a lot about the importance of details in fishing, and not just in electronics. He was a perfectionist when it came to tackle prep. Anyone who ever saw him up all hours of the night rigging tackle knew this about him. He would spend hours replacing trebles, changing out split rings and tying knots until they were to his liking. He respooled line relentlessly. There was not an inch of his tackle that did not get tended to every night.
In terms of detail, he also taught me the importance of having the best equipment available. After he let me use some of his Shimano reels and G. Loomis rods, I realized the true difference in the quality grades of equipment. Gaining an extra 10 to 15 feet in casting distance adds up over the course of a tournament day. Smooth drags help assure fish don’t pull off. Having rods that allow you to feel every nuance of the bottom: slick, mushy, hard, bumpy, pebbly, crunchy. It’s all information that adds up faster with great products. To this day, I still rely on Shimano and G. Loomis for those reasons. Compromising performance in equipment has become a nonnegotiable for me.
When it came to fishing, always keep finesse techniques honest. That was another crucial lesson. Aaron was not afraid to break out finesse in the most unlikely places. Even in places like Florida and Texas, where big baits are supposed to mean big fish, finesse tactics catch huge bass. Even if the water is heavily stained, the small stuff still fools bass when bigger baits won’t. He proved this to me time and time again. To see the way Aaron could so easily switch between a flipping stick with heavy line to a drop shot with 6-pound test – and catch fish on both – was something that still amazes me to this day. He set the bar of versatility so high — I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reach it. But every day I’m on the water, I work to get closer to it.
The first time I ever fished with Aaron, I was just a high school kid. We got in the boat, and he asked me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I was blown away. I was like, “Dude, you’re Aaron Martens, you tell me where we are going and what we are going to do.” But he was not that kind of person. Whenever we fished together, he never acted like he was better than me or was going to show me how it’s done. He wanted to fish the way I wanted to fish to see what I had going on. In doing so, he boosted my confidence in my technique and decisions in a supportive way. He was super nice and encouraging to people all the way around all the time.
Aaron was one of the greatest fishermen this world has ever seen, and yet you would never know it in the way he carried himself and treated other people. It’s like he was the best and had no ego about it. That’s the part of Aaron I want to emulate the most. You can be a fierce competitor and still be honest, humble, kind and respectful.
Aaron was a pure natural talent, full of humility and grace. I’m so blessed and thankful for every minute I got to spend with him on this earth.
