Lake Fausse Pointe gave up another big bass on March 7.
Jarrod Derouen of New Iberia reeled in the “hawg” at approximately 8 a.m. while fishing with his buddy, Troy Laviolette of Catahoula, in a borrow pit along the West Atchafafalaya Basin Protection Levee.
It was the third bass weighing more than 8 pounds caught at Fausse Point since Feb. 15, when Joseph Martin of Baton Rouge boated an 8.17-pounder in the Texaco Field. An 8.99 bass was caught on Feb. 25 by Dustin Dore of New Iberia, who was fishing in Sandy Cove.
Derouen estimated the bass he caught on a junebug Zoom Baby Brush Hog at between 8 ½ to 9 pounds. The batteries in his scale were dead, so he asked some sac-a-lait anglers in a nearby boat if they had a scale. They did, but it was a spring scale; it read between 8 ½ and 9. The bass, which he released, was 24 inches long and 19 inches in girth.
“Oh, it’s awesome, definitely the fish of a lifetime for sure,” he said. “It feels great. I’ve been trying for a long time to catch one that big. Yeah, they’ve got some big ones in there this year.”
Getting it in the boat
Derouen, a 35-year-old machinist for Axis Energy, and Laviolette got out on the lake about 7 a.m. in Laviolette’s small aluminum bass boat. They had caught one bass before that bite of a lifetime.
“We were just flippin’ the bank, flippin’ the brush, when I hooked it. I thought it was a good fish. I thought it was about 5 or 6 pounds,” Derouen said.
“It fought, but it didn’t really last long. We didn’t have a net, so Troy lipped it on the side of the boat. When he lifted it out of the water, we realized how big it was. It happened so fast. We were more excited when we realized how big it was.”
Derouen was using 30-pound braided line spooled on a Shimano Curado reel seated on a 7½-foot Ark fishing rod.
He said he had no second thoughts about releasing the heavy bass, which appeared to be full of eggs. The spawn seems to be on in the lake.
“Oh, no, I wasn’t going to keep it. I was more worried about getting her back in the water, which was the main thing,” he said.
