CYPREMORT POINT — The Southcentral Fishing Association Classic’s winning boat didn’t catch many redfish and two of the three anglers on board didn’t catch any.

But all of them were happy with the results in a winner-take-all tournament worth $1,600 to the first-place team of Brandon Delcambre and Erron Derouen, both of Rynella, and Trevor Broussard of Lydia. They topped a field of qualifiers for the Classic after four regular-season tournaments held out of Quintana Canal Boat Landing.

Their two biggest redfish between 16 and 27 inches long weighed an unbeatable 15.06 pounds, just enough to squeeze ahead of the runner-up team of Leo and Alex Frederick, both of Loreauville, Mark Comeaux and Gerald Huval, whose two-fish limit weighed 14.62 pounds. That team won the regular-season title.

Troy Delahoussaye, Gerritt Landry and Jeremy Lasseigne finished a close third with 14.35 pounds.

“This was our best finish (all season). I think we had a third … nothing like last year. I guess we won the one that counts, money-wise,” Delcambre, a 30-year-old shop foreman at Hydraulic Repair Service at the Port of Iberia, said after the winners fished out of his boat, a 22-foot long Skeeter, with Derouen acting as skipper.

Eleven boats and 35 SFA members fished the tournament held on a rainy day, so stormy that the start and finish was delayed an hour by inclement weather.

When Delcambre’s boat got back to Quintana Canal, where the weigh-in was held under the new pavilion, the three occupants had no idea they would win because the scale on their boat was broken.

“We were having some scale issues on the boat. We actually thought we had about 13, 13 1/2 pounds. We though the big fish was only 7 1/2 (pounds),” Delcambre said.

Delcambre, Derouen and Broussard still didn’t know how much weight they had after they put their two redfish on the scale because SFA tournament director Matt Landry, in a new twist, declined to call out the weights from any of the boats at the scale. Instead, the top team was surprised when he called out the winning weight at awards time.

“It added a little more to the suspense,” Landry said.

The second- and third-place winners didn’t walk away empty-handed. Before the Classic began, each boat put up $100 so the second- and third-place boats would leave with a cash prize. The Fredericks-Huval-Comeaux team won $660 while the Delahoussaye-Landry-Lasseigne boat won $440.

There was little suspense in the winning boat, where Derouen put on a clinic for Delcambre and Broussard, 22. He caught all the redfish that went into the ice chest while “bouncing around” various places inside Marsh Island.

“I didn’t do good that day.  I struggled. No excuses,” Delcambre said. “We were all fishing the same way, side by side. We were all throwing shrimp, you know, under a popping cork.”

Derouen, 31-year-old machinist at Hydraulic Repair Service, said, “I got lucky. Every once in a while you get lucky like that. I just got lucky enough to catch them. 

“We’re all usually pretty consistent. We usually catch our share, each of us. It just happened like that this time.”

He did try to explain it.

“I was on the front of the boat running the trolling motor. Maybe I just got to them first. We all had the same rigs, same baits, same everything,” he said.

Oh, he said, he did let his fishing buddies know about their, ummm, lack of production.

“Oh, yeah, all day. I was just asking them for a little help,” he said.

Derouen said they “were pretty surprised, to say the least,” to win.

“I wasn’t expecting it. For the week or two leading up to it, the amount of fish everybody was catching, I thought it would take 16 pounds to win it,” he said. “We didn’t think we had 15. We had a little trouble with the scale on the boat.

“It felt good. All year we’ve been struggling. It wasn’t like last year. The fish weren’t in the Island like they were last year. The first two tournaments the water was real low. We couldn’t fish where we usually fish,” he said.