MYETTE POINT – A New Iberia bass angler was relieved that the outcome of his first good bite June 19 wasn’t an omen for the remainder of this season’s eighth Wednesday Night Hawg Fights Bass Tournament.

“My first fish, probably my biggest one, I lost it. It was (hung up) on a branch. By the time I got to it, it was gone,” Donald Romero said about the good-sized bass that got away.

That was the last bass that became unbuttoned as Romero, fishing alone without regular WN Hawg Fights BTS partner Bo Amy, caught nine bass under the most godawful conditions facing the 15 boats fishing the Atchafalaya Basin. The three bass he put on the digital scale weighed 5.90 pounds, easily enough to win $338 and strengthen his team’s hold on first in the race for Angler of the Year.

“Well, oh, yeah, we’ve never won a darned tournament. I wish Bo would have been here with me. I found a little drain draining and they were just sitting in the drain,” Romero said.

While Amy wasn’t in Romero’s Phoenix (the field service rep for VAM/USA had to work), he had a major influence on the outcome, according to Romero. Amy has been teaching him a technique that smacked the bass that night.

The conditions were ripe for it, although while the Atchafalaya River was at 14.0 feet and going down at Butte La Rose a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico kept it almost unfishably high but not high enough to keep Romero from catching nine bass.

“I had a good time, man. I’ve never seen that in the Basin in a long time. With the water high like it is, it was amazing,” he said, noting similar trips were common when he was much younger and fishing with the late Calvin Bouton, who was one of the fish-catchingest bass anglers of his time in the Teche Area.

Romero, who celebrated his 69th birthday June 23, learned a lot from Bouton. What he didn’t learn was how to flip as successfully as he did on his way to the improbable landslide win that Wednesday night in the Spillway.

He gives all the credit to Amy.

“Bo’s been showing me how to flip. Let me tell you something, that guy can really flip,” he said.

The sweet spot was a drain he found in Charenton Lake.

“There was a tree laying down inside it. That’s where they were. I could barely see the leaves. They’d just come up and grab it. Nice looking, chunky fish, 2-pound average. With the water high like that, it was amazing,” he said.

After missing that first bass, which he believed was heavier than the 2.24-pounder, Romero was on top of his recently mastered flippin’ game as he dunked watermelon/red Zoom Brush Hogs into the tangle of underwater branches in the drain. He rigged the soft plastic creature bait Texas-style on a 4/0 hook under a 3/16-ounce worm weight.

Naturally, it wasn’t nonstop action. He’d catch or miss one or two, leave the drain for 10-15 minutes, then return, usually to tap another one.

It happened nine times.

“What I did was just took my time and flipped it in there,” he said.

Hooking and boating just one keeper-sized bass (12 inches long or longer) was a challenge for the bass anglers in the other 14 boats, who returned to Myette Point Landing empty-handed. It was one of the shortest weigh-ins in evening bass tournament history.

Also rising to the challenge were long-time fishing buddies Johnny Hester of Lafayette, formerly of Franklin, and Jerry Marcotte of Sorrel, who had three bass hooked but two come unbuttoned. Their lone keeper bass weighed 1.38 pounds.

A father-son team from New Iberia also carried a bass to the digital scale manned by weighmaster Mike O’Brien. Don Shoopman and his son, Jacob Shoopman, also put their only bass, one caught on a Super Bait Buzz Bait by the younger Shoopman, in the weigh-in basket and that bass weighed 1.38 pounds, too.

Hester-Marcotte and the Shoopmans, who tied for second place, split $338. The Shoopmans, AOY in 2015 and 2020, led this year’s AOY race for four of the first five weeks, slipped but surged into second place behind Romero/Amy, 670-626.

Romero dominated when it counted in the most recent outing.

“I was lucky to catch those fish,” he said.

As so often happens, Romero made his own luck. The retired owner of Romero Fishing & Rental, an oilfield fishing tool company, didn’t give up on the spot he had a good bite at while prefishing the day before the season’s eighth WN Hawg Fights BTS.

The wind was howling into the area that day so after starting the evening tournament in one of the borrow pits with a single half-hearted nibble, Romero cranked up his Phoenix bass boat and sped to Charenton Lake. He decided to target the other side of the drain, he said.

Bass were ganged up there, one lonely little spot, waiting to eat.