Caleb Hollingsworth of DeQuincy wasn’t exactly on a mission while bass fishing at Toledo Bend Reservoir, but hey, you can’t let your brother get one up on you, right?
Hollingsworth boated a 10.93-pound lunker bass on Friday, March 4, while taking a break from targeting white perch with his 8-year-old son, Cooper, and another fishing buddy.
The fish not only qualified for the Toledo Bend Lunker Program as the 17th fish of the 2021-22 season, but it put him back on top in the battle of the brothers.
You see, Hollingsworth’s brother, Jordan, had boated a 10.27-pound Toledo Bend bass eight days earlier, on Feb. 24.
“We’ll both get replicas at the Big Bass Splash (in May). That will be pretty cool,” Caleb Hollingsworth said. “We’ve got a wall in camp that we want to fill up.”
Hollingsworth said he, his son and his fishing buddy had caught a few white perch when they decided to take a break at about 10:30 a.m. and go bass fishing.
“We caught three or four real quick, and then the giant hit,” he said. “It was pretty amazing.”
What worked
Hollingsworth was fishing a deep-diving jerkbait on 12-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon, on a Daiwa Tatula reel and Dobbins Fury rod. He was working a creek channel drop where the bottom fell away from 10 to 15 feet, in 58-degree water.
“She hit it about 20 feet from the boat; she short-lined me,” Hollingsworth said. “She jumped three or four times at the boat. Everybody in the area heard me when we put her in the boat. I went berserk. I lost my mind. You don’t know how long I’d waited for that bite.”
Hollingsworth immediately carried the big bass to Fins & Feathers, where it was officially weighed, measured, entered in the lunker program and released. The fish was 26½ inches long and 19 inches in girth.
And now, the interesting part.
“I’m pretty sure she had spawned out,” he said. “Her belly was hollow, and her tail was a little bloody. She wasn’t blown up, not swollen up. If I’d caught her before she spawned, she’d have been 11½, but I just wanted to break that 10(-pound) mark.”
Hollingsworth didn’t waste any time after the fish was released getting back to fishing – this time for white perch.
“We went straight back to white perch fishing. My boy, he wanted to catch ‘em,” he said. “He wound up catching 13, reeling them in by himself.”
