A record, by George!

April 1, 2013 — I knew we shouldn’t go fishing on Easter Sunday afternoon. But I rationalized that if it was okay for kids to hunt boiled eggs, it was okay for me to hunt a few bass. So my fishing buddy, George, and I went for a while. But I never, never never meant to call this much attention to our trip. Now I can’t help it.

I guess I should start at the beginning. George is an expert at fishing after a big rain, so he wanted to come up to Lake D’Arbonne and go bass fishing. I guess with it being Easter and all, he figured a miracle might happen and he might catch one.

Boy, did that ever pan out. We headed down to fish near the spillway where we figured the muddy water hadn’t gotten yet. We were fishing the rocks right by the edge of the spillway when George threw his 12-inch John Deere green colored plastic six-legged lizard bait up into a tree on the bank, leaving it dangling about six inches out of the water. In the process, he got this huge backlash. What happened next is, well, you figure it out.

While we were sitting there, this huge bass jumped out of the water and grabbed the tractor green lizard and half the little tree as well. Since George never sets the hook very quickly when he gets a bass bite, he still had time to finish getting the backlash out of his reel before setting the hook. When he did, the fight was on. But he huge fish had swum 70 feet away, right in front of where the water falls over the dam into Bayou D’Arbonne. George couldn’t do anything with him. After about 20 minutes of give and take, the huge fish tired, but was swept over the spillway, line screaming as it stripped off the reel.

I quickly pulled the boat over to the bank, scrambled up the rock embankment and down the other side of the dam and found the big bass tangled near the bank in some weeds. I managed to find an old cane pole that somebody left there and pulled on the line, finally getting it in my hand. I was shocked as I lifted the monster onto the bank, the line broke and the fish fell to the ground. I drug the monster fish back over the hill to a waiting George.

We were both in shock. We put the huge bass on our little digital scale and it pegged out to the limit of 20 pounds so fast it shorted out the scale. We tried to put the fish in the livewell, but it was way too big. So we emptied the Dr. Pepper 10’s and sardine sandwiches out of the 48-quart icechest and stuck the huge fish’s head in there as far as it would go.

Being Easter Sunday, we didn’t know where we could weigh it, but we found a local grocery store open and the manager let us in the butcher department to weigh it. Folks, remember where you heard it first.

The fish weighed 24 pounds, 2 ounces.  A NEW WORLD RECORD LARGEMOUTH BASS CAUGHT AT LAKE D’ARBONNE, by George!  The old world record was 22 pounds, 4 ounces caught about 80 years ago in Georgia.

We couldn’t find a LDWF biologist to verify the catch, but we woke my  second cousin by a third marriage, Paul, who took a couple of biology courses back in the day at Northeast Louisiana Senior College, from his nap and he confirmed it. (“Yep. It’s a fish.” Those was his exact, official biology opinion).

By the time we got through weighing him, it was dark outside and we only had our SmartPhone to take pictures and it wasn’t smart enough to have a flash. But we did the best we could. That photo is at the right. The story hasn’t ended well, though.

Seems there is some controversy about whether the fish was caught in Lake D’Arbonne or Bayou D’Arbonne since he was actually finally pulled from the water below the spillway. And, I hate to even mention this for George’s sake, but right after we weighed the fish, it spit up a whole two pound white perch. We know because we weighed the white perch. Here’s the catch. To be an official world record, the fish is supposed to be weighed twice. Without the white perch, when we weighed the bass the second time, it only weighed 22 pounds, two ounces  – two ounces shy of the record.

It gets worse. We took the fish (the bass and the white perch) home and iced them down to take it to the LDWF today and get some good pictures. Then we went to grab a bite of supper. Catching a world record bass works up an appetite. When we came back, the fish was gone. Kind of. George’s oldest son, Little George, found the fish, decided a fish fry was in order and …. yep, made two great big 10 pound filets out of it. No other words have been spoken about it. We are going to take the head, the entrails, the filets and the white perch to the LDWF today to see what we can work out.

Some might call this an Easter Miracle. Others might just want to take a minute and remember what TODAY is.

Happy April Fool’s Day.