MANY – If the wind was their friend, Brad Romero and Nick DeRouen might have won a Louisiana Bass Cats tournament in a landslide April 1-2 at Toledo Bend.

The wind blew hard, however, the day before the tournament and, as a result, Romero and DeRouen won by the slimmest of margins over runners-up Mike Sinitiere and Kevin Suit. The winners did go wire-to-wire but needed every fraction of an ounce for the W with 27.15 pounds to pocket $540.

“It was kind of close but we pulled it off. I mean, it shouldn’t have been that close. We had some good bites we didn’t get in. We should have had a big bag the first day,” DeRouen said.

Friday night’s wind blew in some murky water onto main lake points around San Patricio Creek, he said. Those areas are where they caught some very good-sized bass while prefishing.

Sinitiere and Suit, both of New Iberia, had two consistent days just like the winners. On Day 2 they added five bass weighing 14.76 pounds to give them a two-day total of 27.03 pounds and a strong second-place finish worth $320. They relied mostly on Zoom Horny Toads in Housen Creek.

Jordy Russo and Hagen Riche finished third in the 12-boat field after rallying from a first-day catch of 7.83 pounds to produce the heaviest limit of the tournament, 16.70 pounds, on the second day on the border lake shared by Louisiana and Texas. They won $216.

The tournament’s biggest bass was a 6.88-pound beauty carried to the digital scale by Todd Robertson and Perry Moss. It earned $120.

Romero, 29, a Lafayette outdoorsman who was born and raised in New Iberia, said the winners had two solid days despite some swings and misses and bad luck with changing water clarity.

“I knew we had a solid day the day before. We were in first. It was a matter of getting another solid day,” Romero said.

“That was enough,” he said about their two-day total.

As DeRouen said, murkier water conditions challenged them the first day. Plus, as his partner noted, they got to an area after the shad spawn started that morning.

“The shad spawn was going on when we got there. We were kind of late. We saw them blowing up. We went over there and caught two,” Romero said.

Those two keepers stayed mighty lonely in the livewell for a long while.

“We were stuck on four fish for the longest time, probably until 3 o’clock. We went to another spot and culled three of those fish out and got a five-fish limit,” he said.

On Sunday they got to that shad spawn area much earlier and caught five keepers, three of them the kind that could stay in the livewell all day. They remained in the area until midday.

“We knew we weren’t going to be able to win it there. We went to a bedding fish,” Romero said.

They got that nice-sized bass to bite an artificial lure an estimated 10-15 times but it’d pick it up and spit it out each time. Finally, Romero cast a “big ol’ black plastic lizard” and the bass zigged when it should have zagged. He set hook and boated a 4-pounder that sealed the victory.

Derouen, 39, a consultant operations manager for Houston-based Avert-Tek, said the pattern kept changing over the weekend. He said they caught on white Spro Popping Frogs, Chatterbaits and soft plastics between the grass and buckbrush after the shad spawn.

“We had a good pattern until the wind switched. They had a few in the creeks back there but it seemed like the better ones were in the main lake,” he said.