Lee Glass and his fishing partner, Mark Ebersole, blasted off in a club bass tournament at 6:46 a.m. on March 22. They ran about 5 minutes to their first spot, then Glass pulled out his rod and made his first cast of the day.
For all intents and purposes, that was the only cast he needed to make all day, since it resulted in an 11.90-pound lunker, 26 ¼ inches long and 20 inches in girth.
Glass was Carolina-rigging a green-pumpkin Zoom Magic lizard on 22-pound Seaguar Tatsu line spooled on a Shimano Curado 200K reel mated with a 7-foot-6, Falcon Cara Dragger II rod.
Fighting the big fish
A 30-year-old support engineer from DeRidder, Glass targeted a mid-lake drain leaving a spawning flat with a few scattered stumps.
“It’s a pretty good place. We caught them there the previous weekend, and I caught them on Thursday,” Glass said. “I was dragging in about 9 feet of water, and I stopped to reel in slack; when I got the tension back, she was there. I checked her, then I laid into her.
“She ran right at the boat. I was running the trolling motor, and my partner was right next to me. I had to go under his line, jump over the console on the driver’s side to get to the back deck,” he said. “I clicked the button, got her turned around, and I backed off the drag. I made my way back to the front, had to jump the console again. I told my buddy to get the net, and he made a perfect pass with the net and netted her.
“She never came up; when I got my first glimpse of her, I thought she was an 8- or a 9-(pounder). When she made her second pass at the front around the trolling motor, I knew she was bigger by the way she pulled. I thought she would be at least a 12.”
Glass had a set of Bubba scales in his boat; the fish first registered 12 pounds, but the numbers danced around and settled on 11.9.
Tagged and released
With the fish in the boat at 7 a.m., Glass and Ebersole fished around for a little while, waiting for Fin & Feather Resort, an official weigh station for the Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program, to open at 8.
“I had the oxygenator going full blast, and I took the divider out (of the livewell) to give her plenty of room,” said Glass, who is familiar with the process, having gotten Lunker Bass Program replica mounts for two previous fish, an 11.9 and a 10.9.
He got to watch his fish get weighed, measured and tagged, then he walked to the ramp and released her to swim away.
Glass feels like his big bass may have been a little bigger a week or so previously.
“She still had some eggs, but she wasn’t full,” he said. “I think she had (spawned) once, but I think she had moved out and was going to go back in and spawn again.
“I think they have been a little late going in this spring. The water temperature just shot up so fast. It finally leveled off and has been consistent the last two weeks – between 60 and 65 degrees.”
