BREAUX BRIDGE – A midmorning flurry of bites from bass up to nearly 5 pounds carried Raven Owens and Brad Romero to the top in the second Louisiana Bass Anglers tournament of 2024.

They culled to a 3-pound average with their five-bass limit weighing 15.81 pounds to top an 18-boat field on a windy day with temperatures plunging from midday on as a cold front swept through the region.

“I didn’t think we were going to win to be honest with you. I thought we had 13 pounds,” Romero said two days after the tournament at Lake Martin in St. Martin Parish.

The 36-year-old Owens caught the 4 ½- to 5-pound bass that made the difference around 10 a.m. on a Chatterbait. It put on an acrobatic display when it jumped during the fight but stayed buttoned up.

Owens, 36, found the pattern with his bladed jig a few hours after sunrise when he nailed a 3-pound class bass “out in the middle of nowhere,” according to Romero. That fish’s location indicated bass weren’t up shallow along the lake’s cypress tree-lined shoreline but 20 to 30 yards out, he said, probably due to the changing weather.

The New Iberians targeted cypress trees and any other structure that distance from the bank and hooked and boated bass for about an hour before the bite cut off completely. One cypress tree gave up two bass.

Romero , 30, said he tied on and stuck to an old compact Humdinger spinnerbait because he wanted to throw something different than Owens. It worked as they traded hooksets on nice-sized bass.

“They were so tight to trees. The fish were spawning fish. The big ones we caught were definitely spawning,” Romero said. “It was just a reaction bite on that. We were out bucking the wind … it was blowing.”

The runner-up team of Michael Louviere and Tabitha Landry was a little more than 3 pounds off the pace but still cracked double digits on the digital scale. Louviere and Landry’s limit weighed 12.54 pounds.

Travis Harmon, fishing alone, finished third with five bass weighing 10.58 pounds.

The tournament’s biggest bass, a 5.65-pound beauty, was carried to the weigh-in site by Levi Louviere and Seth Comeaux.

After the rough start when the tournament got underway at safe daylight on Lake Martin, just moving across the water was a bright spot for the winning team. Owens’ boat’s trolling motor was in a do-nothing mode, kaput, for the first 30 or so minutes, Romero said, noting his fishing buddy worked on it enough to get it running sporadically.

“We had to fight the trolling motor all day,” he said.

The productive window of opportunity lasted about 1 ½ hours starting around 9 a.m., then slammed shut. The bass they needed, though, were in the livewell.