John Elkins and Sam Nowalk didn’t show up to the BASS Nation of West Virginia Buddy Trail Championship on the Monongahela River to just compete for the $5,000 winning prize but instead, they competed in place for Dewey Wooten and Willie “Doodle” Adkins. And they won it for their longtime friend Doodle who has been battling with some recent health issues.

Doodle, a BASS Nation Regional Champion, a former BASS Nation National Championship qualifier and many wins throughout his career with BASS Nation of West Virginia was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago after an auto accident going to a tournament. The accident at the time left him with a severely broken arm that doctors thought would need to be amputated but was diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney cancer during his stint in the hospital.

He beat all the odds, recovered from his broken arm and maintained the cancer to fish competitively for the last few years. Even claiming the win at the exact same tournament last year that Nowalk and Elkins won today.

This year, Nowalk has stepped in for his long-time friend to compete on the BASS Nation of West Virginia Buddy Trail with Dewey Wooten while Doodle has been dealing with his health issues. They’ve scored two Top 25 finishes along the way, but claiming the win today meant more than anything.

Wooten’s mother had gotten sick earlier this week and wanted to stay back to take care of her, so Elkins stepped in for Wooten this weekend. Elkins and Doodle have been long-time fishing partners around the southwestern part of West Virginia and have just about won everything in that region. They share a lot of time in the boat together. Elkins is a phenomenal angler but doesn’t spend much time fishing outside of that part of the region in West Virginia. But one would expect if turned loose in the state he could make a big statement and he sure did.

“It was all for Doodle,” said Elkins. “Man if they would’ve made us say something on stage I was gonna lose it. I was tore all to pieces.”

And while some tournaments you could consider luck to be a factor, more times than not when you see a team win a tournament it is one of those things that it is just meant to be. And it was meant to be for Nowalk and Elkins to win this weekend.

“You know how John is, if he’s got a big bag of fish you could pretty much expect him to say ‘I just got lucky’,” said Nowalk. “He just ain’t lucky, he’s one of the best fishermen I’ve ever been in the boat with.”

On Day 1, Nowalk and Elkins ran to Morgantown to only see that their starting spot had lost two feet of water on it. They decided to run to an area where they had a spawning fish, Elkins caught it and they then scrambled around to catch what they had on Day 1.

“We was going to fish down in Morgantown today,” said Elkins. “It was real foggy this morning so we decided to just stay close and ended up boating a couple of fish early this morning close to takeoff. Once the fog started to lift we decided we wanted to lock down and for whatever reason the locks never opened up for us. At that time, I knew for whatever reason it is meant for us to stay in this pool so we stayed in the pool and caught just enough to win.”

The duo took home $5,000 and won it for their friend.

“It wasn’t about the money. We just wanted to do our very best to represent Doodle and Dewey this weekend,” said Nowalk. “The best part of it all, Doodle called us multiple times today and yesterday to see how we were doing and that meant the world to us especially considering he is the reason I got into tournament fishing.”

Finishing in second place was the duo of Hunter and Mark Gump with a two-day total of 13.07 pounds.

Finishing in third place was the duo of Rick Hamer and Billy Payne with a two-day total of 13.03 pounds.

Marty McClanahan and Jason Gillespie won Freedom Outdoors “Freedom Bucks” worth $1,000.

53 teams competed.

229 fish were weighed and 225 fish were released alive for a 98% live release rate.