Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting the Costa Del Mar annual sales meeting in Daytona, Fla. Costa has been a sponsor of mine for as long as I’ve been fishing professionally, and I was excited to finally get to meet the great people there. While I was there, we discussed a lot of things about eyewear, and I told some stories from the tour. On the flight back, it dawned on me that it might make a great blog.
Over the past few years, I’ve shared a couple of stories with the Costa people. First, a competitor of mine showed me a pair of sunglasses that looked like they had taken a bullet. Apparently, his sunglasses saved his eye from a weight.
The second case wasn’t as good. I met a guy (a friend of another Elite competitor) that had lost his eye while fishing. I can’t recall the full story, but the memory of meeting and talking with this angler reminds me every day to protect my eyes regardless of the light conditions.
I’m not writing this to scare you, but to encourage you to wear your sunglasses even in low light conditions. Most good brands have low-light lenses. With Costa, it’s their new 580 Sunrise lenses. You can wear these no matter how dark it is on the water. They’ll protect your eyes from flying objects like sinkers, hooks and bugs and give you UV protection at the same time.
On the home front, after returning from Daytona Beach I headed down to Grand Lake in Oklahoma for the ABA Championship. I met and spoke with many of the competitors, and I spent some time in the Bass Minder booth to show off their products. That’s always a lot of fun, but I couldn’t help but look out over Grand Lake and get excited about the upcoming Bassmaster Classic. In just a few weeks, I’ll be coming back to practice (before the cut off dates) for the championship.
This is also the time of the year I get to spend more time with the family. Over the weekend, we checked out the pumpkin patch. For Mason’s birthday last week we presented him with his first fish mount, a 3-pound crappie he caught on Lake Quivira. He was excited and can’t wait to get his next prize catch for a mount.
Enjoy the fall fishing and be sure to protect your eyes regardless of the light conditions!
