Talk about a bassy “high five.”
Two West Monroe bass fishin’ buddies fished Caney Lake on Dec. 28 and shook up the bass fishing world near and far with a five-bass limit they say should be the heaviest ever recorded in the Sportsman’s Paradise. Those “hawgs” weighed as much as nearly 51 pounds on one scale and as low as 48 ½ pounds on another scale.
Colby Dark, 18, and Gage Struben, 19, who took a break from pre-fishing for their first major tournaments of 2024, wet a line back-to-back days the last week of December. They believe their limit the second day reigns as the top weight for five bass in Louisiana.
The pumped up bass anglers put the biggest five fish they caught that day on three reputable tournament-caliber digital scales, but none of them are certified, Dark said. One read nearly 51 pounds. Another read 49.88 pounds. A third gave the smallest reading, 48 pounds, 6 ounces. They are in the process of trying to verify which scale is the most accurate.
Dark said he submitted all three weights to Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries personnel at the District 2 Regional Office in Monroe. The first-year fishing guide who owns Hooked Up Guide Service said he believes if there is a state record for five-bass limits, he and his fishing buddy have topped it.
Previous top five
As far as he can find out, the previous highest five bass limit in the state was around 47 pounds.
The Louisiana Outdoor Writers Association, keeper of all state freshwater and saltwater fish records since the 1940s, doesn’t list a specific category for five-bass limits. LDWF biologists for years have played a role in examining and identifying entries for LOWA.
As far as Dark and Struben are concerned, they are potential state record-holders. If there isn’t a category, they are hopeful a one is installed.
“It’ll be really hard to top that,” Struben said.
Dark hooked and boated the largest of the five bass, a 13-pound, 5-ounce “hawg.” It is his personal best bass in public waters. The smallest bass weighed just under 9 pounds, he said.
Dark and Struben whacked big bass in the lake a day earlier but ran out of the prime meal ticket – a ¾-ounce V&M Football Jig, to which they added a green pumpkin Crock-a-Gator creature bait. Their biggest five bass that day weighed an estimated 40 pounds.
Restocked and ready
When they ran out of the jigs, they called it a day, went home and restocked their supply while planning to fish again the next day. They got on the water at 6:30 a.m. with TGG Media, a social media marketing agency, to film the pending beatdown of big ol’ bass, a video that, by the way, Dark planned to release as soon as possible.
Their first bass during the cold morning was a 10-pound class fish. Nevertheless, bites were hard to come by.
“It was kind of slow,” Dark said. “We went graphing and found them in the middle of a roadbed, kind of toward the end at the grass at, like, 13 feet deep. When we pulled up it was cast after cast.
“We missed two really big ones that came off right at the boat.”
“They fought pretty hard,” Struben said. “They’d just try to dig down, like they were trying to wrap up in something. They were so fat they couldn’t really jump … just come up to the surface and shake their head.”
The bass fought harder than they bit, according to Dark.
“We slowly drug it and held it still, just barely fishing it,” he said. “You really didn’t feel a bite, just a a mushy weight and they just sat there, wouldn’t hardly move.”
And the fish were so heavy they barely moved on the hookset. But it got real really quickly after that.
