MILAM – Two brothers, both accomplished bass tournament anglers, decided to “trust the process” in their second half bid to win a Louisiana Bass Cats tournament March 15-16 at Toledo Bend.

While Ben Suit and Zach Suit were enjoying bass tournament competition March 16, the younger bass angler overheard a conversation in a nearby boat. It was important because they were fishing against the norm.

“I could hear them saying, ‘All you’ve got to do is trust the process.’ That’s what I kept telling Ben,” Zach said.

The message resonated as the brothers, who usually fish on the same page, anyway, stubbornly adhered to their pattern of fishing away from the bank, which paid off with a 21.59-pound limit that coupled with the previous day’s 19.26 pounds gave them a total of 41.35 pounds.

It was the second straight spring the two transplanted Texans, born and raised in New Iberia, walked away from the weigh-in site with a win. Last year they weighed two colossal bags to win with 60-plus pounds to beat the other Louisiana Bass Cats.

“It’s a good feeling. Our mindset going in is always just to have a good time and catch some fish. We caught plenty of fish and we had a good time,” Zach said.

Ben, of Port Arthur, was pleased and proud at the same time following the latest victory.

“Well, I’ve said in the past and I’ll say again, the Bass Cats have some of the best local anglers around. So anytime you get to beat them it’s nice. Twice is incredible!” he said, noting he was impressed by the results the first day, particularly by Raven Owens and his wife, Brandy Owens.

“He (Raven) said he had his biggest weight ever (27.31 pounds) and his PB (9.72 pounds). It’s pretty awesome to see all that stuff go down,” Ben said.

The Owens team showed out, as the hip slang term goes, to finish second with a two-day total of 37.97 pounds. They hooked and boated their bass on june bug weightless Senkos, Raven said, noting his 9.72 came on Saturday after he cast the soft plastic into buckbrush in less than 2 ½-feet of water.

Brad Romero and Dylan Kelly were third with 10 bass weighing 36.27 pounds. Romero and Kelly showed up at the digital scale manned by Mike Sinitiere with 22.94 pounds on Day 1 and came back with 13.33 pounds on Day 2.

The Suits shined when they returned to their personal playground, a sprawling lake they grew up fishing as boys out of the family’s camp on the Texas side in Patroon Bayou. They chose an area that dozens of other boats also preferred to be Sunday, as well as the day before and the day before that and so on. It was as if a magnet drew everyone there.

“There were boats everywhere. (But) we were fishing grass pretty deep. We weren’t really fishing the bank.You know the fish are going to the bank. That’s why you ‘trust the process.’ You’ve got to stick to your game plan,” Zach said. “Granted, we went to the bank every now and then to check.”

Basically, he said, Ben kept his Skeeter bass boat in 10-foot depths and they’d cast mostly an undisclosed moving bait as well as a bladed jig occasionally into grass flats and onto points. There is an advantage to those near-offshore areas, according to the younger brother.

“I think that’s why it was consistent. Those places load up fast compared to the banks,” he said.

Heavy fishing pressure probably took its toll on many bass along the shoreline. Nevertheless, it was tempting to fish the visible cover in 1- to 2-foot depths.

Ben, who has Ben Suit State Farm in Orange, Texas, emphasized they worked the deeper underwater vegetation without relying on forward facing sonar.

“We stayed out and ripped grass. There’s a lot of speculation we ’Scoped but, no, we didn’t ’Scope. We fished grass,” Ben said.

Soon after they put their first five keeper bass in the livewell the second day, they looked at each other with the same thought in mind as they faced, hopefully, the culling process.

“We caught our limit pretty quick. Ben said, ‘Why don’t we throw bigger baits?’ ” Zach said.

In the first few minutes after upsizing, he said, “I had an 8-pounder follow my bait to the boat.”

Then Zach, who recently moved to McKinney from Denton but continues to work as an insurance salesman at Matthew Sand State Farm in Denton, caught a 7.09-pound bass and the critical upgrade was on.

The process paid off.