Another great season has come to an end. With the end of a season always comes an AOY champion and the Best Six team members. Coming into the last we had 3 anglers within 3 points for AOY and 4 anglers fighting for the last 2 spots for the Best Six team. Saline/Larto was the lake where all this was to be decided. With no cool fronts yet summer patterns were still in effect and fishing would be tough.

Before I go too far into this tournament, I want to mention a little something about the previous tournament since I didn’t do an article on it. The previous tournament took place on the Red River out of St. Maurice. This was the first time we had been on the river in 2 years. The winner ended up being a guest Sam Canoe with 15.03lbs and 2^nd place went to Will Walker. Both these anlgers locked up into Pool 4. Congrates to Sam on the win! With Will getting first place points in this tournament it set up the 3 man race for AOY going into the last tournament.

When all the fish had been weighed in, the man standing on top was Will Walker. Will brought in the biggest sack with 17.86lbs. This win secured his first AOY title and his first SBBC win. All members may not know that Will had an accident a week ago that required him to have eye surgery to remove a piece of metal, but this would not stop him. This kept him from being able to drive his boat so Rick Villamerette was his caddy for the day. There is no doubt that Will earned this title the hard way. This also shows that when it’s your time there is nothing that can stand in your way! Congratulations Will on your win and AOY title! I am sure there will be more to come!!! Will caught most of his fish on a magnum worm except for his first and biggest fish (6.29lbs) which came off of a frog first thing that morning. He caught 7 keepers all day with his 5^th fish coming at 1:45. He focused mostly on the massive amounts of vegetation on Saline right now.  He said his 2 biggest bites came as he was beginning to pick up his bait to reel it in. Second place in the tournament and also AOY was Wallace Woodson with 13.37. Wallace focused mostly on shallow cypress trees flipping a beaver style bait. He did however catch one on a spinnerbait. Wallace mentioned an early morning bite and then didn’t catch much until the end of the day. Third place went to Jason Brown with 13.29lbs. Jason is the frog KING. He didn’t have a fish at 10:30 then caught 17 fish between then and 3. All his fish came on a frog in the lily pads in Big Creek. Rounding out the top 5 was Jeremy Sonnier with 12.58lbs & Mike Barbat with 10.91lbs. We had 6 fish weighed in between 4.3lbs and 4.63lbs.

When the final standings were added up (dropping the 2 lowest) the 2016 Best 6 Team is as follows: Will Walker, Wallace Woodson, Josh Bordelon, Aaron Belgard, Brandon Nugent, and Mark Barbat.

We had 22 members show up the last tournament. The tournament stats will be listed at the end. Overall we had a great year with a total of 49 members. We had a total of 8 tournaments and had 8 different winners. This goes to show you how competitive this club is. We have a great bunch of guys and I hope to see everyone back next year. I will post a proposed date schedule and meeting date sometime in December. I talked about this some yesterday at the tournament and ended up having a few members ask about it at the end so I am going to try and have an open tournament on Saline the 3^rd weekend of October (10/15). I post a flyer this week.

TOURANMENT STATS

NUMBER OF ANGLERS – 22

NUMBER OF FISH CAUGHT – 62

NUMBER OF LIMITS – 8

TOTAL WEIGHT – 140.47LBS

RELEASE PERCENTAGE – 98.4%

AVERAGE WEIGHT PER FISH – 2.27LBS

AVERAGE WIEGHT PER ANLGER – 6.39LBS

AVERAGE FISH PER ANGLER – 2.8