Jeffrey Tall of Jennings broke a fishing rod last Friday, March 19.
It was an old rod, so well used that all the writing had been worn off the blank: the name of the manufacture, it’s length, action, what size lures it would best cast.
You could say the rod went out with a bang. The previous day, March 18, Tall used it to land a 10.81-pound Toledo Bend bass.
“It was one of the last bites we got. We caught one right after we caught the big one,” Tall said. “We didn’t catch a whole bunch of fish that day, but some of them were all right.”
Tall was fishing in Housen Creek with buddy Kevin Richard, casting a football jig on 20-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon in 5 of 6 feet of water.
“They were definitely not on the bed, but they might have been fixing to move in,” Tall said. “It was a good bite. I definitely knew I’d gotten bit. She came up and wallowed a little bit, and I thought she was 5 of 6 pounds. Then, she took off and started going crazy under the boat. That’s when I realized she was bigger than 5 or 6.”
Boating the biggun’
Tall finally got the fish under control, and when he led her boatside, he reached down, lipped the big fish and brought her aboard.
“We checked her on a scale we had in the boat, and she was 10.77,” said Tall, who motored to Fin and Feather to have her officially weighed and do the paperwork to get the fish registered with the Toledo Bend Lake Association’s lunker program.
“We knew what we had. When we put her on the scales at Fin and Feather, she weighed 10.81,” said Tall, who already has a replica mount of a fish entered in the lunker program, a 10.98-pound bass.
“I broke that rod the next day.”
