Knock on wood! Erath anglers do that for 3rd in JaBoom Classic

STEPHENSVILLE — Two Erath High School Fishing Club members got the preseason boost they needed Aug. 6. You might call it a JaBoom!

Austin Hebert, a senior, and Bradley Gravouia, a junior, put a pattern together early on their way to a hard-earned third-place finish in the 2nd annual JaBoom Masters Classic out of Doiron’s Landing.

Gravouia and Hebert chose to fish the Atchafalaya Basin side and concentrated on the Little Bayou Sorrel area, where they culled to a five-bass limit weighing 11.56 pounds. Like high school and junior bass anglers in the other 57 boats, they had to fish strictly with Ama-based JaBoom Bait Co. soft plastics distributed to each team before takeoff that Saturday.

The EHS bass anglers were pumped after only their third tournament together. They teamed up to fish the last two tournaments of 2021-22.

Hebert, a wide receiver/outside linebacker who’s in the midst of preseason football workouts with the Bobcats, said, ““This tournament we were able to put five scorable (keeper) fish in the boat AND we were able to cull three of them. It felt really good. We really needed that. We’ve been setting goals. We want to weigh five fish. Bradley was able to prefish and we were able to put five in the boat. We had a pretty good day.”

“I was pretty excited about it, practicing for the high school season. I’m pretty excited for high school because this was a good warmup for a fishing tournament,” Gravouia said.

The 2022-23 school year got underway Thursday, five days after the JaBoom Masters Classic. The Spillway became a classroom and the student/athletes learned quickly the best way to get bass to bite.

They caught 14 keeper bass while flipping Texas-rigged “Atchafalaya Craw”-colored JaBoom Boom Bugs. But the two bass anglers weren’t casting willy nilly.

“I got the first fish on a stump in a drain. Then another one on a laydown. We just went from wood to wood fishing them. That’s how we picked up our fish,” Gravouia said.

Their boat captain, Gravouia’s father, Kevin Gavouia of Erath, was impressed.

“This was their third fishing trip together. They were flippin’, only fishing stumps and laydowns. They (bass) were only on wood. They were able to cull all day long,” the 46-year-old Swagelok Louisiana Co. employee said, proudly, happily, after the trip.

Other boats that came and went didn’t fare well at all in the area, he said, because they targeted only grass and hyacinths.

The Gravouias prefished the area a few days before the tournament and focused on a handful of canals around Little Bayou Sorrel. The key was to find moving water.

Their biggest bass was a 3.56-pounder.

The JaBoom Master Classic winners were walker High School Fishing Team’s Kade Palmer and Evan Burris with a limit weighing 12.72 pounds. After winning they hit the road for the 2022 Abu Garcia Bassmaster High School National Championship that began Thursday at Lake Hartwell in Anderson, South Carolina.

Matthew Fontenot and Cole Billiott, members of the Lafourche Junior Bassmasters, finished second with five bass weighing 11.74 pounds in the Classic.

Hebert and Gravouia can’t wait to fish their first full season as a team.

Gravouia, a varsity soccer player at EHS, is ready to see what they can do on the water. So is Hebert.

“We’ll be able to get a little bond going. Unfortunately, it’ll be the last year to fish together,” Hebert, who graduates next May, said.

Their 2022-23 Louisiana High School B.A.S.S. Nation season opener is Sept. 3, which will bring them right back to Doiron’s Landing.