Thrun, Moynagh capture FFCBC crown yet again

Oops, they did it again.
Joe Thrun and Jim Moynagh hauled in 55.89 pounds over the three-day Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championship—beating out the father/son team of Alex and Darrell Keszler by more than two-and-a-half pounds—to claim back-to-back titles and four in total.
The pair are a threat every time they team up for the event, so don’t expect them to feel sorry for rest of the field.
“Those Keszlers have won about every tournament there is in Canada and they did a deserving job themselves,” Thrun said after the final weigh-in Saturday under the big tent at the Sorting Gap Marina.
“They had some big bags and we’d like to see them win but, of course, I’m more glad we won instead,” he added.
Sitting in ninth place after Day 1 on Thursday, the defending champs had a 19.20-pound bag Friday to take over top spot, then hauled in 20.09 pounds on Saturday to seal the victory.
Is winning this tournament getting old, yet?
“These fish are spoiling us, but it’s never routine by any means,” Moynagh stressed after the final weigh-in.
“After practice, we really felt like we had a good area, but it didn’t produce any fish,” he noted. “So we just fell back on some other things, and one of the spots actually improved from [pre-fishing].”
Moynagh and Thrun first claimed back-to-back titles in 1998 and ’99, to go with two second-place finishes in ’97 and 2000.
In eight tries as a team at the tournament, they’ve had seven top-three finishes (Moynagh went on a five-year hiatus prior to last July’s win).
Moynagh is the big fish every time he competes here being that he’s a professional FLW Tour angler. He has earned more than $800,000 on the Tour with three tournament victories and 14 top-10 finishes in 101 events since 1995.
The duo repeated as champs here thanks, in large part, to some last-minute heroics.
“My rods were strapped in and [I] was folding down the net and tucking that away, and then Jim said he had one, so I had to jump up and get ready,” Thrun recalled of Moynagh’s final cast.
“It didn’t jump or anything so I thought, ‘Oh great, a northern is going to make us late for the weigh-in’ but then he said, ‘It’s a big smallie,’ so we netted it up and locked everything down, threw our smallest one out, and drove back just in time.
“It was literally a last-cast deal,” Thrun stressed.
The pair actually caught two fish in the final 10 minutes which they ended up weighing in, giving them some much-needed breathing room over the Keszlers.
The father/son duo fell short of top spot, but were more than satisfied with their position.
“We’ve been third before, and now we got a second, so it’s just a matter of buckling up to get first now,” Darrell Keszler said.
The Bemidji, Mn. pair of Lauren Ras and Chuck Olson held the “hot seat,” after weighing in an 18.37-pound bag earlier Saturday, until the final three teams were brought through the tent.
“It was our best-ever day out there in the three years we’ve been here, but we didn’t expect to last as long as we did [on the hot seat],” Olson noted after being ousted by Mike Luhman and Raveling, who ended up third with a three-day, 51.83-pound total.
The big fish of the tournament was 4.79 pounds, weighed in by Scott Walsh and Heath Iacarella on Friday.
Paul Jewiss and Mike Graham had the big fish Thursday (4.68 pounds) while Luhman and Raveling had the lunker for Saturday (4.53 pounds).
John Janousek and Chad Johnson had the biggest catch on Day 1 (18.98 pounds) to grab the early lead, with Thrun and Moynagh leading the way both Friday (19.20 pounds) and Saturday (20.09).
The champs weighed in nearly three pounds less than it took to win a year ago (58.36 pounds), and 418 fewer bass were caught overall.
“The fish move around so much in this lake that you can be on them one day and the next day they are gone,” Moynagh said.
“The key is to get into a place where it seems like the fish are coming to you and if you can do that, then you can weigh these big bags.
“We just happened to find one of these groups and pounded them,” he added.
The top Fort Frances pairing was the team of Mike Adams and Vince Godbout, who came in 12th spot overall with 45.05 pounds—helped by their 17.56-pound haul on Saturday.