Denise Forbes is likely to think twice the next time her boyfriend, Steve Sanford of DeRidder, asks her to drop his anchor so they can fish a spot a little better.
He asked her on Saturday, Feb. 8, after the pair had some success catching bass in lily pads in Vernon Lake, in the middle of the afternoon. About the time she grabbed the anchor rope to drop the cinder block to the bottom, Sanford got a bite.
It wound up being a 13-pound, 1-ounce monster, a 27-inch beast that may be the biggest the 4,200-acre reservoir in Vernon Parish has ever produced – by a single ounce.
Sanford was working a watermelon/red Yum Dinger on a split-shot rig at about 3:30 p.m. when he got the bite in 62-degree water. His ABU Garcia spinning outfit was spooled with 12-pound Stren.
“This was the catch of a lifetime,” Sanford said. “There was a tournament on the lake that day; we weren’t in it, but my girlfriend was keeping up with it. The guy who won it weighed in three fish: a 7, an 8 and an 11-6. We had been fishing all day and had caught some fish, and I joked that I was gonna catch an 8 or a 9 – then I caught a 13-1.”
In the lily pads
Sanford and Forbes had found some fish the day before, and with the wind kicking up, they headed back to the spot, which featured a lot of lily pads.
“We saw this big fish come up, then go back down in the pads, then we saw it again,” he said. “I thought it was about a 7 ½. There was this little trail through the pads, and I threw in there and caught a buck (bass), and she caught one. We kept at it and circled back to throw at it. I have a concrete anchor in my boat, and I told her to grab the anchor and throw it out so we could stop and fish this place a while. As soon as she grabbed the rope, I got the bite.”
Sanford had been casting the big soft-plastic bait, letting it sink, then picking it up and dropping it, repeating that action all the way to the boat. This time, the bait got nowhere close to home.
“When she hit it, there was no doubt about it,” he said. “I was lucky I got it in, surprised she didn’t break my line in the pads. One time, she took it and went straight away, and she got into a pad for a second, but she came back out. Then, she went up under the boat, and I had my reel about in the water trying to keep her from breaking off.”
A trophy for Vernon
When the time came, Forbes manned the net and was able to slide the big fish in – even though it was a tough fit.
“I weighed it, and it was 13-1. I have checked my scales, and they are accurate,” Sanford said. “There’s no place on Vernon to weigh one on certified scales. I measured it – I didn’t have any tape that I could measure the girth with – and then we released it back in the lake. From what I’ve found looking it up, the biggest before that (from Vernon) was a 13, but I don’t know if it was certified or not.”
A search of Louisiana Sportsman archives uncovered a 13-pound bass caught at Vernon in October 2021 by Nathaniel Street of Leesville – but nothing bigger.
“This fish was my biggest ever,” Sanford said. “A year ago, I caught a 9.9 on Vernon, and that was my personal best. I thought back then, that one was going to be hard to beat. I’m 61 years old, and I’ve fished all my life. And now, I catch a 13-1.”
