Weir, Schoen win Morgan City Madness Elite Redfish Tourney

Bobby Weir and Matt Schoen of Florida won the Morgan City Madness Elite Redfish Tournament after turning in a two-day total of 57.76 pounds.
The duo from Santa Rosa, Florida, won a $10,000 check for their first-place finish.
Weir said he and Schoen fished an area about 40 miles east of Morgan City both days.
“Fishing is always typically phenomenal here,” he said. “It’s our favorite area to fish of any area of the circuits. You name it. This is the place that we like to fish.”
The duo started the tournament in fourth place after the first of two days with a four-fish catch weighing 27.47 pounds before bring a four-fish total of 30.29 pounds to the scale in day two.
“The weather on the first day threw us for a little bit of a curveball,” Weir said. “We were expecting sunny skies. It was cloudy all day. … Each day it took us to about 10 or 11 to get our limit. Today, the fish were extremely finicky.”
Schoen said sunshine was the difference on day two that helped them win the event.
“It was sunny all day. … When we got to our spot, the sun was out,” said Schoen, who is cousins with his fishing partner. “Yesterday, the sun didn’t come out until about noon, and we kind of had to do a changeup on how we normally fish. This morning, the sun came out, and when we showed up, there were just piles of fish everywhere.”
The Morgan City tournament is one of three in the Elite Redfish’s Check-It Stik Team Series. The first tournament was in Slidell and the final one of the series will be in Port Lavaca, Texas, Aug. 30-31.
This is the first tournament Schoen and Weir have fished in the series this year, and Weir said they may do one or two more tournaments this year.
The top 25 in in points in the Check-It Stick Team Series qualify for the Tidewater Team Championship, presented by South Padre Island Tropical Travel, Oct. 4-6, in South Padre Island, Texas.
This week’s event in Morgan City originally was scheduled for July 12-13 in Morgan City, but it had to be rescheduled due the threat to the area by Tropical Storm Barry.
The change in date meant the tournament did lose a “good number of teams,” said Pat Malone of the Elite Redfish Series.
He said they would have had 75 to maybe 100 teams had the weekend not changed.
Instead, the tournament had 35 teams, coming from as far east as Florida, as far west as Texas and as far north as South Carolina.
“Still, it was a really good opportunity to showcase Morgan City, because it’s been quite a while since they’ve had a big-time tournament here,” Malone said.
Malone was pleased with the hospitality shown for the event, too.
“As far as hosting the event and the folks around here, we want to come back,” he said. “It was awesome. We couldn’t have been treated any better. Everybody just went out of their way from the police department, the fire department.
“Everybody went out of their way to make sure we had the type of event that they knew we wanted and we wanted to film for Discovery (Channel), and it was just tremendous,” Malone added.