Some fishermen – some people, actually – might be upset with a birthday present that’s a couple of days late.
Not Hunter Dubroc of Deville.
Dubroc, a power-company lineman, turned 23 on Thursday, March 21. Two days later, a green, scaly 11.4-pound birthday present jumped in his boat.
“That was a pretty good birthday present,” he admitted.
Dubroc was fishing with partner Dawson McCann in a bass club tournament on 1,775-acre Cotile Lake east of Alexandria in Rapides Parish on March 21. At around 10 a.m., they pulled up on a submerged hump near the dam, its surface dotted with logs and stumps – Dubroc had noticed it a while back when the lake was down.
One of those logs held a big bass.
“We were just fishing around it,” said Dubroc, whose father, Brendan, runs Slab Hunters LA, a crappie-fishing guide service. “When I pulled up, we were sitting on the edge of the hump. We caught one or two, then we moved about 40 yards and started casting back to where the boat had been sitting.”
Keeping up with the bass
Dubroc was fishing a ⅜-ounce black/blue Googan finesse jig on 20-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon, spooled on a Lew’s reel mated with a Duckett Trial flipping stick. He said he felt the jig crawl over a log and sink back to the bottom.
“Then, I felt a little bream bite,” he said. “She held it about 2 or 3 seconds, then she started digging. She didn’t fight that hard the first 10 or 15 seconds, but as soon as she got about 35 yards out, she jumped out of the water three or four times. That had us scared. We thought she was about an 8- or 9-pounder. We started praying she didn’t come off.”
The bass was taking drag as Dubroc hauled her toward the boat. She dove under the boat, this way and that, leaving Dubroc running from the bow to the stern to keep up with her.
“Finally, I pulled her to me and got her positioned, and Dawson netted her as she was jumping again,” Dubroc said.
Previously caught fish
That pretty well settled things as far as the tournament went, with Dubroc and McCann winning with a 5-pound limit weighing well over 20 pounds – three on the jig and two on a 12-inch worm. But it was only the beginning of the rest of Dubroc’s story.
“She was full of eggs; I don’t know if she was spawning on that hump, but her tail was bloodied up,” he said. “Me and Dawson were talking; we had prefished the day before, and we fished shallow and just caught small buck bass. Maybe she had been in, and when we had a little cold snap the week before, she moved back out. We decided to go to that hump the day of the tournament.”
Dubroc noticed something else. On the bottom of the fish’s dorsal, a notch had been cut out. Believing it was a mark that the fish had been checked by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, he called and found out that was so.
“That notch on the tail, that’s how we knew,” he said. “We called, and Wildlife told us that they had gotten a look at it when it had been caught a month ago. They weighed and measured it, cut a notch, and put it back. It weighed right at 11, they told us.
“We asked if they wanted to look at it again, but they told us to put it back, so we took it back to the hump and released it.”
