Records show Fisher’s lunker was caught on the same lure just 20 days earlier
After a brutal Friday morning with just a couple of bumps here and there on Toledo Bend, Kyle Fisher finally caught a bass after lunch — a whopping 6-incher.
“My wife took a picture of it and teased me a bit,” the 38-year-old from Orange, Texas said.
But the teasing abruptly ended late that afternoon when Fisher hooked up with one deserving of lots of pictures — an 11.04-pounder he hooked in a cove near the Indian Mounds.
He and his wife Karen had been enjoying spring break away from their educational duties, and after some lunch at his father-in-law’s camp, the couple headed out to the Indian Mounds following Karen’s brother.
“We fished one area for a while,” Fisher said. “My brother-in-law moved to another cove as the winds picked up.”
Fisher was casting a junebug Zoom Trick Worm tied to 40-pound braid spooled to a Shimano Chronarch reel on a medium-light 6-foot-6-inch H&H rod.
At 6:55 that evening, Fisher made what he referred to as a “dinky” cast.
“It was a bad cast with the lure ending up landing just 5 feet from the boat,” he said. “Karen and I were laughing about it.”
But Fisher felt a bump, and immediately set the hook.
“She took off, and it felt like a redfish running,” he said.
Fisher worked the fish as his wife tried to find the net in storage under the front deck.
“The fish got hung up in the hay grass,” he said.
But the angler just kept reeling, and was able to lift the fish up just below the foliage.
“The line was stuck in the hay grass and the bass was swimming on the edge,” Fisher said.
“I reached down and grabbed her with my line still hung up in the grass.”
After Fisher’s panic attack was over and the bass was in the boat, he started screaming and hollering about the size of the fish.
“Karen asked me how big the fish was and I told her about 7 pounds,” he said. “I didn’t have a scale and there were no boats around us fishing.”
Upon inspection of the bass, Fisher noted a yellow tag protruding from the fish.
“I told Karen that the tag meant that the bass was part of a study, or that it may have been tagged as part of the Lunker Program,” he said.
Fisher placed the fish in the livewell and was debating whether or not to head in, but his wife protested a little.
“She said, ‘Maybe they run in pairs,’” Fisher said. “Well, she loves to fish, so she cast a few more times.”
Finally, the couple headed back to the camp and allowed everyone to see the fish. On a handheld scale there, it weighed 10.95 pounds.
“I called Toledo Town and Tackle and they were still open – so we headed over there,” Fisher said.
The bass officially weighed 11.04 pounds on the certified scales at T-Town, and was later released alive. Fisher will receive a free replica of the fish in mid-May from the Toledo Bend Lake Association.
It is lunker No. 104 entered into the records for the 2015-16 Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program.
The fish was caught just 20 days earlier on a watermelon-purple Zoom trick worm by angler Keith Comeaux in Mill Creek, but was full of eggs then and weighed 12.9 pounds.
