Chris Vedrines of Coteau holds an 8-pound bass he caught on the second day of a Lafayette Oil Men’s Bass Fishing Club tournament at Lake Fork in Texas. Vedrines had 38 pounds in the two-day tournament on his way to winning the bass club championship.

Chris Vedrines knows how to celebrate anniversaries.

On his 10th year in the Louisiana Oil Men’s Bass Fishing Club and the 20th year of Advanced Graphics Engraving, a business he and his wife, Cheryl, established in 1997 while he was working in the oil field industry, the Coteau bass angler reeled in bass after bass on his way to winning the bass club title in the 50th year of the Louisiana Oil Men’s Bass Fishing Club, one of the oldest bass clubs in the country.

The Lafayatte bass club wrapped up its season earlier this month with a tournament on the Bayou Teche in Patterson. By then, the next bass club champion was a forgone conclusion. 

Vedrines’ third-place finish while fishing with Jean Trahan sealed the deal with an exclamation point on Nov. 4.

Vedrines, 57, who also fishes with the New Iberia-based Louisiana Bass Cats and in local Hawg Fights, did more than just w-i-n the LOMBFC title. He may have established two records on the way in a point system in which each bass club angler’s best seven of 10 tournaments count in the standings. 

Of Vedrines best seven tournaments, five were worth 100 points, the max. 

“Nobody can remember someone winning five tournaments and scoring as many points as I had, 693,” he said last week. 

He takes great pride in the fact he won five tournaments with five different bass club tournament partners on five different bodies of water.

“Versatility is something that means a lot to me. Henderson’s different than the (Atchafalaya) Basin and the Basin’s different than (Lake) Fork and …,” he said.

Still, it wasn’t a runaway victory. Frank Lemoine, who finished with 687 points, was right on his tail the entire year, Vedrines said.

“You know what’s funny? One guy was close to me. Any other year, I would have blown them out of the water. With that many points, I would have coasted any other year. But I had to work,” he said.

“I was cautiously optimistic. Frank Lemoine is very good. If I would have stumbled, he would have caught me,” he said.

Vedrines was working in the oil field industry in the 1990s when he was invited to  the bass club’s 2007 end-of-the-year awards banquet by a friend in the oil industry and a member of the Lafayette Oil Men’s Bass Fishing Club. He had been an avid saltwater fisherman until giving it up and giving the fish a break.

“When I started fishing again, it was bass,” he said.

He joined the bass club. Ten years later, he will be the man of the hour at the awards banquet in mid-January at the Petroleum Club in Lafayette.

Until this year, his highest finish in either bass club was third, he said. He qualified for the Top Six  “several times” and, by virtue of his hard-earned bass club title, will lead the LOMBFC into competition next spring at Toledo Bend.

“I’m very proud because they’ve got very good fishermen in the Lafayette Oil Men’s who have been fishing a long time,” he said, emphasizing the eighth and second-to-last words of the sentence. “I’m extremely happy to do that this year.”

Vedrines’ tournament wins this year were at Lake Fork, Toledo Bend, Amelia, Atchafalaya Basin (Bayou Benoit) and Henderson Lake.

“It’s certainly the best year I ever had, by far,” Vedrines said.

That “best year” was highlighted, easily, by his five-day outing on Lake Fork that ended with two days of bass club tournament fishing in which he had, by himself, 38 pounds with two five-bass limits. During that stay in Texas, he had two bass weighing more than 8 pounds, two 7-pound plus bass and several 5s and 6s to his credit, he said.

What pleased him then and still does is that those bragging-size bass were caught on topwaters, which will remain unidentified, per his request.

“That they were all on topwaters makes it even more exciting. There’s nothing like an 8-pound bass hitting a topwater bait,” he said about the “hawg” he caught on the second day of the tournament.

Vedrines and his tournament partner, Rickey Guthrie, won the Lake Fork tournament with 51.77 pounds.

Vedrines, who was born and raised in New Iberia and graduated from New Iberia Senior High in 1978, rode to the bass club championship in a new 20-foot aluminum tunnel hull built by Gator Trax, a Springfield boatbuilding company, and powered by a 200-horsepower Yamaha. He got it in May, about the time he took the lead for good in the standings.

He prefished “a lot” this year, enabled to do so because, he said, he “pretty much gave up the daily operations” at the family’s thriving business.

That gave him time to hone his topwater bassin’ techniques. Buzz baits, plastic frogs and the unidentified topwater that smoked ‘em at Lake Fork were the keys to winning it all in 2017, he said. 

He hooked and boated a 5-pound class bass on a plastic frog fished over duckweed on his way to winning at Henderson Lake.

“It was a little green Scum Frog, something everybody’s got in their tacklebox,” he said.

Vedrines said juggling two bass club schedules — meetings and tournaments — and a series of Hawg Fights this year was a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, he said, the bass club tournament dates didn’t conflict with each other.

He’s looking forward to fishing competitively and fishing hard again.