MANY – It’s hard to beat Levi Louviere and his guest, Seth Comeaux, on the first day of a Louisiana Bass Anglers tournament at Toledo Bend.

Louviere and Comeaux, both of Broussard, formerly of Franklin, proved that for a second year in a row when they reeled in an unbeatable five-bass limit March 15. Their 3-plus pound average of 17.31 pounds cemented the deal.

“It feels good. It’s almost like we picked up where we left off last year. I’ll bet we caught about 40,” Louviere said.

The result was the same but the winning pattern completely different and very interesting considering they caught the majority of the bass in depths of 12 inches or less along the shoreline of the Blue Lake area on the Louisiana side north of Pendleton Bridge.

Louviere didn’t plan to catch them in skinny water at all. The 40-year-old surveyor for T. Baker Smith LLC was pleasantly surprised because while prefishing in the days leading up to the tournament most of the bass were caught a little deeper and mostly on plastic frogs.

“I caught big fish in practice on a frog and left the area alone until tournament day,” he said.

They tried that first thing that morning but, poof, that pattern was history. Nothing, as he said.

“We ended up going down the cove” and spotting activity in bunches of dollar lily pads, Louviere said.

“We saw fish swirling. We caught some of our bigger fish we could see with their tail out of the water! We started catching one after another after that.”

And how. Comeaux spotted the tail of their biggest bass of the day, which swirled, sped like a torpedo to the Zoom Super Fluke he was casting, then smashed the soft plastic like a shark. He also caught their biggest bass the next day in the second tournament.

Louviere tipped his cap to another one of the bass club’s competitors, Mike Louviere of Loreauville, bailed them out with a Good Samaritan’s gesture. Louviere said first the trolling motor quit and later, when he tried to start the big motor, it didn’t fire up.

Mike Louviere passed by and offered to take Comeaux and their bass to the weigh-in.

“Seth jumped in the boat with him and Mike saved us. I missed all the fun stuff” while staying with his 21-foot Xpress with a 250-h.p. Yamaha Sho.

There was very little or no other pressure on those shallow bass that Friday, Louviere said. However, it was a different story Saturday.

The winning team in the bass club’s second tournament on March 16 benefitted from quality bites and no one was more thankful than Travis Harmon, 52, of Lafayette, who fished with fellow Franklin native George Merrifield of Pearl River. They grew up together and were able to pair up for the mid-March tournament at Toledo Bend.

Their limit tipped the digital scale at 16.80 pounds and included the day’s biggest bass, a 5.34-pounder caught by Harmon.

“It (the W) was a long time coming. There are a bunch of solid guys in the club and they’re hard to beat,” Harmon said.

The ACME truck driver and his buddy fished the same way as the day before and it paid off while fishing just north of Palo Gaucho Bayou.

“We did the exact same thing. We threw some swim baits with a little underspin (blade) and frogs. The bigger fish came on frogs,” Harmon said, noting they targeted patches of “dollar lilies” in a stretch with docks.

”I can’t believe there were that many solid fish in that little area. I showed Bubbie and them my graph. That’s all we did the whole time” was go back and forth,” he said.

Around midday a bruiser bit his white Stanley Top Toad. The bass he put in the boat would be the biggest bass of the tournament.

“Oh, yeah, that was a fun fight,” he said.

A few hours later a 3 ½-pound class bass also hit his white plastic frog and joined the ride to the weigh-in.

Louviere and Comeaux added a second-place finish to their win a day earlier. They came back the second day with five bass weighing 14.17 pounds.

Bubbie Lopez and four-time bass club Angler of the Year Dicky Fitzgerald cashed in on March 16 with a limit weighing 13.83 pounds, good enough for third place.