I hope everybody had a good Christmas and you’re looking forward to a Happy New Year. I know people are busy this time of year, and I’ve been the same way.

There are a few things keeping me hopping. One of them, as I hope most of you have heard, is my new company, Duckett Fishing. We’re going 100 miles an hour getting the company going, and I hope you’ll take a look at the new Web site, www.duckettfishing.com, which is now a live site.

But even with everything going on at Duckett Fishing, I have to say that the other thing keeping me busy is just as important - and that’s trying to win another Bassmaster Classic.

I’ve been preparing for the Classic, and like every other angler trying to win, I spent about some days this month at Lay Lake. We had a cutoff earlier this month on time we can spend at the lake, and I took about six days looking at the conditions and trying to set up a gameplan.

Even though I know the lake well, I don’t fish as often as I once did. It was interesting to go and see what’s changed. And the grass has definitely changed since the last classic there two years ago.

We had unusually cold conditions four years ago, and I hope we have them again. But that’s not likely.

My primary goal when I went to Lay this month was to kind of refresh my icons. And part of what I mean by that is that I have to prepare for how to fish the Classic in a crowd.

Fishing the way I’ll have to fish this Classic is a two-edged sword. The greatest thing about our sport is that we’ve reached a point where there’s a huge fan base that wants to follow us and watch what we’re doing on the water. But it’s reached a point where the crowd on the water can affect the outcome of the event. For starters, since I won the Classic on Lay the last time, there’s going to be a crowd of people early trying to see what the last winner at Lay did.

Another example of crowd interaction is last year, when I went from having about four boats in my area on the first day to more than 30 the second day. I led after the first day and it changed things, and I wasn’t able to fish it exactly the way I wanted. The crowd of boats changes things.

The people in the boats are great. They police themselves and do everything they can to stay out of our way, but it’s a challenge to do well with a crowd on you.

Last year at the Red River, I also have to say that part of the crowd was other anglers in my general area, and one of them was Skeet Reese, who did a great job of keeping everybody behind while his fished his spots. He played his area the best way you can play it. He had a lot of boats, too, but he kept himself positioned so that there was no interference to what he was doing. And, as you’ll recall, he won.

I don’t know how Kevin VanDam handles it. He has a hundred boats following him all the time, and I think that’s part of why he’s perfected fishing on the move. He’s a reaction bite fisherman, and he’s always at a moving pace.

Again, I’m not complaining because having a lot of boats out there means our sport is popular, and you cant’ beat that. It’s just a factor.

But back to Lay. I’ve got my gameplan for now. I won last time because of the bites I got at Cedar Creek. And believe me, there will be plenty of anglers on Cedar Creek and Shelby Shores. There will always be big fish there.

But I’ve got 73 icons, and I’m going to hit them all. I’ll fish dam to dam. I’ll be on the move.

It’s going to be a great Classic. More on that later.