LOREAUVILLE – Instead of dropping a trolling motor over to fish the day before the fourth Wednesday Night Hawg Fights Bass Tournament Series tournament of 2024, Blaine Miller put on his walking shoes.

The Loreauville bass angler who has walked and fished a stretch of Teche Lake many times did so again that afternoon at Lake Fausse Pointe. He had no other choice because his tow vehicle was unable to haul his boat.

Miller caught a handful of bass in one of his favorite spots along the canal near Marsh Field Landing. When Miller and his WN Hawg Fights BTS partner Brandon Sellers of New Iberia eventually decided to fish the Hawg Fight, leaving as boat #16 in the 20-boat field, they had a short ride to the hotspot on April 24.

Well, it wasn’t so hot. It gave them the cold shoulder at first.

“The first 15, 20 minutes, we didn’t get a bite. I said, ‘Brandon, what do you want to do?’ ” Miller said a few days after they pleasantly surprised themselves by winning that fourth HF with three bass weighing 8.32 pounds worth $450.

They put their heads together, then decided to ride to another spot much farther away in the lake, then to another location.

Sellers said, “Our two little spots didn’t pan out.”

“I said, ‘We might as well go back there (Teche Lake Canal) and die. There’s nothing else to do,’ ” Miller said.

After returning to the canal after 6:30 p.m., one hour into the tournament, Sellers got the team on the board with a solid bass weighing nearly 3 pounds. Two or three minutes later he boated a 14-inch bass.

Suddenly, the team had a little pep in its step, er, casts. The canal had their undivided attention.

“That changed right there. We were actually catching fish. We had an hour to fish and we needed just one more,” Miller said.

He hooked and boated their third bass, another 14-incher, before picking up something other than a soft plastic to flip a little later, casting the moving bait out and getting it walloped by a 4-pound class bass he reeled in to cull one of the small keepers.

Game. Set. And match.

Their closest challengers were runners-up Devin Verret and Dylan Kelly, whose three-bass limit weighed 7.77 pounds for $270. Verret and Kelly, one of the youngest two-man teams on the water, also boasted the biggest bass of the tournament, a 4.12-pounder worth another $100.

The father-son team of Jerry Gondron and Nathan Gondron finished third with three bass weighing 7.40 pounds for $180. The Gondrons were enjoying their first HF contest together in at least a year while they devoted their time to a tiny, blessed new family member.

Miller and Sellers, meanwhile, narrowly missed out on AOY in the WN Hawg Fights BTS season in 2023. They got back in the win column on the last Wednesday of April.

“It was one of those lucky nights, you know what I mean,” Sellers said about his team’s first-place finish.

Miller said, “It’s awesome when it happens like that. We just got lucky, really. We were down and out when we got in there (the second time visiting Teche Lake Canal). I’ll take it!”

They almost missed the most recent tournament. In the days following the third HF on April 10, Sellers was under the impression there wouldn’t be a regularly scheduled WN Hawg Fights BTS contest on April 24 because several regulars went to Toledo Bend for the Southern Bass Club Association Elite 8 tournament April 26-27.

“We didn’t have plans to fish it,” Miller said.

“When we realized they were still having the Hawg Fight, we decided to fish it. It was last-minute,” Sellers said.