MYETTE POINT – Marlin Hebert of New Iberia has another Angler of the Year title and secured the best seat in the house whenever the Coteau Bass Hustlers meet again.

“Oh, yeah, I got bragging rights and I get to sit in a recliner. Whoever gets first place the month before gets to sit in the chair at the meeting,” Hebert said, looking forward to sitting in the soft, comfortable chair the next time the bass club gets together.

“I’d really like to thank the Coteau Bass Hustlers anglers. They really got a good bunch of guys over there. They all fish hard. They have a really good time, after hours, too.”

Hebert had to earn the title start to finish. The 56-year-old air conditioning manager for Butcher Air Conditioning said as much after wrapping up his run to AOY with a big win Nov. 9 in the bass club’s 12th and final tournament of 2024.

“Jason Jones was on my tail all year. He had some first places (two) in there. It wasn’t really a walk in the park,” Hebert said about his fifth AOY in his 30-year span with the Coteau Bass Hustlers.

He won the other titles in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. Following the AOY in ’21 he was unable to fish all the tournaments over the next two years due to a family conflict, a grandbaby’s birthday party, one year and a boating accident that knocked his boat out of action the other year that forced him to fish the rest of the season as a non-boater.

“This year I got the boat back together and did pretty good. I told the boys in the club, ‘I’m back in action now,’ ” he said.

And how.

Hebert grabbed the lead on a March weekend with two firsts at Toledo Bend. He hooked up with Chris Clements, who was recommended to him as a guest by Jones, the 2023 AOY.

“Well, Chris fished the weekend before that. Him and his brother were messin’ around. We went back the following week and the fish still were out there in the open lake, Housen Bay. We got on them with swim baits and swim jigs. We were really catching them good way off the bank, way out in patchy grass around the ditches,” he said. “We had first and big bass both days. We really had a good time in the boat. I’m just as excited for everyone else to catch as I am.”

He stayed in first place the rest of the season, riding four seconds and two thirds on the tournament schedule to offset the fact he “bombed” in two tournaments, including the first tournament of the year. He shined at Toledo Bend and, later in the year, finished second at Caney Lake.

“Those travel tournaments propelled me,” he said.

All Hebert needed to do to claim AOY was show up and go fishing in the regular-season finale. Hebert did more than that. He went out and won the tournament out of Myette Point Landing with a limit weighing 12.60 pounds.

“Me and my partner, Robbie, had a really good day on the water. We caught a lot of fish, the weather was real nice and we had a good day of fishing,” he said. “We probably culled six, seven times. It was a really good day of fishing. Yeah, it was fun.”

The winning team fished Mud Cove, which they chose over Ruiz Canal and Grevemberg, the latter a longshot with the extremely low river stage. Mud Cove’s bass bit on buzz baits and spinnerbaits early, he said, including a 3-pound, 6-ounce, bass he nailed on a buzz bait. It was the tournament’s lunker bass.

“They were off the bank, in the patches of grass. We started catching on spinnerbaits and buzz baits. It really worked out well for us,” he said, adding that when the bass stopped biting the moving baits, he got out his punchin’ stick and went to work on the grass patches.

His go-to baits this year were spinnerbaits, swim baits, Senkos and Speed Craws. The top artificial lure was a Humdinger Spinnerbait, either ¼-ounce or, if a bigger one was needed, a ½-ounce model, he said.

Steve Doumit and his godson, David Doumit, finished second in the final tournament. The elder Doumit waited it out in his favorite borrow pit along the levee and once the water cleared, the Doumits tattooed the bass on june bug/red soft plastic crawworms to get a limit weighing 9.81 pounds.

Jones and Bradley Louviere were third with five bass at 7.94 pounds.