NATCHITOCHES – Brock Daigle of New Iberia, rookie captain for one of the hardest fishing Bassmaster Junior Division teams in Louisiana, decided their vacation on May 7.

Daigle, his son, Hollis, and Hollis’s teammate, Vincent Soprano of Charenton, will be traveling to South Carolina to compete in a national bass fishing tournament in mid-July. The Catholic High School Fishing Team members earned the prestigious berth the first Sunday in May with a seventh-place finish in the Junior Division of the 2023 Strike King Bassmaster High School Series tournament at Red River.

The four bass they carried to the digital scale weighed 5 pounds, 4 ounces. That punched their ticket to the 2023 Bassmaster Junior National Championship for second- through eighth-grade bass anglers and scheduled to be held July 21-22 at Anderson, South Carolina, the weekend before the Strike King Bassmaster High School Championship there July 27-29.

Daigle, a U.S. Army National Guard veteran who is a welding teacher at the Iberia Parish Career Center, and an avid outdoorsman, is already studying Lake Hartwell, site of the national tournament where as many as 200 Junior Division teams will compete the third weekend of July.

Vincent, the son of Kade Soprano and Schuyler Hebert, and Hollis, who never met each other before the first tournament in September 2022, finished 4th, 5th twice, 12th and 15th while fishing all but one tournament, the April 1 event at Manchac. That they took on an extra tournament, one that attracted teams from several other states, was a testament to the team’s growth as competitive bass anglers and teammates.

“We were already going to the Open. As soon as it was announced, I said, ‘Man, we love this sport. What’s one more?’ Being our first year, we didn’t know this could lead to nationals until later on, after we got rigged up,” Daigle said.

They camped at Grand Ecore RV Park after leaving New Iberia around 5 p.m. Friday. Daigle’s wife, Ashley Charpentier Daigle, a kindergarten teacher at North Lewis Elementary School, towed the family’s 2005 Ranger with a 115-h.p. Mercury while Daigle pulled the camper.

After registration Saturday morning, Daigle and his team got out on the water and went looking for bass. It went well as they caught good-sized bass on several artificial lures in several places.

The captain was confident and so were the boys, who got an opportunity to fish when CHS Fishing Team founder and coach Jacob Shoopman started the Junior Division in Summer 2022. Vincent is a sixth-grader while Hollis is in the fifth grade.

Their starting point on tournament morning was in a small cove filled with flooded timber within a few minutes south of the boat ramp. It was good to them as they caught eight bass, including the four keepers that rode with them the rest of the day.

As luck would have it, good things like a consistent bite on a bream-colored spinnerbait or a watermelon/red wacky-rigged plastic worm came to an end at mid-morning.

“The bite stopped as soon as the sun came out, 10 o’clock in the morning,” Daigle said.

He decided to go to their second location, the St. Maurice Recreational Area they scouted Saturday, an area in Pool 3 near Saline Bayou that they also fished in a regular-season tournament Nov. 5. Keeper-sized bass didn’t cooperate there at all when it counted and they stayed stuck on four keepers.

“They were excited. It’s the most fish (keepers) they caught or weighed this year. They wanted to get the fifth one … but they were happy with what they had and Hollis actually was excited he and Vincent each got to weigh two,” the proud captain said.

Daigle described their walk from the boat to the weigh-in stage with their bag of bass. Blissful.

“They had some pep in their step,” he said.

And so pumped up later when they realized they finished in the Top 10. The boys weren’t the only ones on Cloud 9.

“Oh, the captain was pumped. I was confident going into Sunday we’d find what we needed to get to nationals,” Daigle said.

“I was just so excited,” Hollis said about qualifying for nationals.

Vincent said, “It feels pretty good. I was expecting to go to a few tournaments, have some fun. But I didn’t expect to go to nationals. Yeah, it’s pretty surprising. I think I’ll be pretty nervous. We’re up against a lot of competition.”

He also said his bass fishing game has improved since he began fishing with the Daigles.

“Mr. Brock showed me more rigs to fish. He showed me how to cast a baitcaster,” Vincent said.

At the Open, the young team would have been more excited had the two young bass anglers filled out a five-bass limit, which would have been a first. Still, they weighed in four keeper bass, the most in their first year of bass tournament fishing.

Hollis hooked up with a fifth keeper momentarily at their first stop tournament day.

“I had one on but lost it at the boat. I have no clue what happened. I was mad. I lost it,” he said. “I thought I was just hung up. I didn’t hook it correctly.”

Ah, hangups. The bane of bass anglers old and young. Hollis’ dad touched on that issue after prefishing the day before their recent tournament when he said, “The boys really need to work on their technique. Casting makes me want to pull my hair out. They started on buzz baits this morning, went spinners (spinnerbaits), then I suggested finesse fishing. They wanted to swim everything, even Senkos.

“Hollis had a wild idea of wacky rigging through cover and he just doesn’t know better. They have the ideas and the building blocks but just need to put them together. … They are young, though. It’ll all come in time.”

Another veteran bass angler agreed and said by the time the youngsters are high school seniors there probably will be a buzz across the state about the awesome team of Hollis and Soprano.