Jason Jones, right, and his guest, Chris Clement of Lafayette, formerly of Houma, notched a first-place finish June 25 with a five-bass limit weighing 12.13 pounds. They topped a nine-boat Coteau Bass Hustlers field that fished the Atchafalaya Basin out of Myette Point.
Jason Jones, right, and his guest, Chris Clement of Lafayette, formerly of Houma, notched a first-place finish June 25 with a five-bass limit weighing 12.13 pounds. They topped a nine-boat Coteau Bass Hustlers field that fished the Atchafalaya Basin out of Myette Point.
MYETTE POINT — It’s been a rough time around the digital scale for Jason Jones since 2020 when he was Angler of the Year in the Coteau Bass Hustlers.
Until June 25 in the Atchafalaya Basin, that is. Jones and his guest, Chris Clement of Lafayette, caught bass hand over fist to win the bass club’s sixth tournament of 2022. Their five-bass limit weighed 12.13 pounds.
“I’ve been getting my butt kicked for a while,” Jones said after topping a nine-boat field that fished out of Myette Point Boat Landing.
How so?
He didn’t put a bass in the boat during the bass club’s previous two tournaments. And last year, fraught with losses of people dear to him, wasn’t anything to write home about. He thought this season would be his year, but, not so much in the first five bass club tournaments.
Jones, 50, a sales rep for Alamo Hydraulics of Louisiana, believes he shattered the slump earlier in June when he joined other couples on an outing to Caney Lake. He busted the bass’ chops then and there.
“A friend said, ‘It looks like you broke your juju.’ I think I did. It felt great,” he said about the win.
That was evident early the morning of the recent tournament. The team started building their winning limit right off the bat at a drain in Amerada off the falling Atchafalaya River.
They had three keepers by 6:30 p.m. with Jones offering a Whopper Plopper and Clement, who works for Expro, formerly Frank’s Casing, throwing a plastic frog. They left to hit a small lake in the area but quickly returned to the drain.
“That’s when it was really on. Whoooo, we sure had fun. We caught a lot of fish. We probably caught 30-plus fish,” Jones said.
The bass bit and bit hard on his shad-colored KVD crank bait and Clement’s favorite shad-colored swim bait.
They culled and upgraded their limit of 1 ½-pound average bass to eventually 2 ½-pound class bass. Their biggest bass weighed 2.62 pounds.
“They just got a little bigger each time,” Jones said.
They finished nearly 1 pound ahead of Brad Romero and his guest, Raven Jones, who had five bass weighing 11.32 pounds, including the tournament’s biggest bass, a 3.11-pounder.
Keith Altazin and his guest, Jacob Shoopman, finished third with five bass at 10.61 pounds.
“I figured we had 12 pounds. I didn’t think it would be enough, especially with the Basin falling I figured somebody would catch a couple of 3s at least,” he said.
