Bass fisherman Travis Pew of Leesville figured he had about 10 chances to lose a big fish he hooked on Vernon Lake the morning of Sunday, March 23. He hooked her in some hydrilla, watched her jump completely out of the water, almost had her wrap up in his trolling motor, then the outboard motor, then a space between his trim and the stern of his Bass Cat boat, and at one point he had about 15 feet of slack line to recover after one little battle.
“I should have lost her 10 times, but the good Lord helped me get her in the boat,” said Pew, a 35-year-old worker for the Department of Defense.
Exhausted, nearly overcome by surprise, emotion, whatever, Pew sat down on the casting deck of his boat, got out a set of digital scales and learned that his personal-best bass, formerly 8.66 pounds, was now 12 pounds, 8 ounces.
Capturing it all on video
The 4,200-acre lake in Vernon Parish had truly given up a monster to Pew, who had a GoPro camera mounted that recorded much of the battle for his Voodoo Outdoors YouTube channel.
“Toledo Bend is probably my home lake; I fish it quite a bit, but Vernon is right down the road from me,” he said. “I was just fun-fishing for my YouTube channel.”
Pew was going down a bank around 7:30 a.m. fishing a Chatterbait Jack Hammer on an Abu-Garcia Jordan Lee series rod and reel spooled with 16-pound Sunline, working it through emerging lily pads in 2 to 3 feet of water, that were just inside of a patch of hydrilla.
“I was just swimming it through the pads, crawling it along the bottom,” he said. “The rain had the water a little dirtied up, and I needed something with some vibration. One cast, when it came out of the pads, I thought it was hung in a clump of grass. I tried to pull it out, and that’s what set the hook. I immediately felt the headshake, and I knew it was a good fish; I figured, maybe a 6- or 7-(pounder).
“I knew it was a better fish when I couldn’t get her to the surface in only a couple of feet of water. I was trying to pull her up, but she was taking off into deep water. Then she jumped, came clear out of the water. Her tail was all the way out of the water. That’s when I knew it was a double-digit fish.”
A heart stopping few minutes
The bass went back down, going under the boat, then up under the bow, where Pew tried to pick up his trolling motor so she wouldn’t wrap him up, but the trolling-motor cable got caught on one of his depth finder screens.
“It was a total cluster,” Pew said. “I got the trolling motor halfway up; I had to get the line out of it. I had a lot of slack, and that’s when I really thought I would lose her. But as soon as I reeled all the slack in, my rod bowed over. I was fumbling to get my net out and get it extended, then she went around the boat again, by the big motor, but it was raised up a little because the fishing was so shallow. If the motor had been down like it usually is, she would have probably gotten me tied up on it. That saved my fish.
“I saw the line between my trim and the back of the boat, and I had to get my rod under the big motor and out the other side. It felt like she had rubbed the line against the motor and it might break, but she did me a favor. She came around and looked at me, and I looked at her. She was getting tired, and I got down and tried to get her head in the net, but I couldn’t. Then, I put the net deeper in the water, and she dove right into it.”
Pew regained his senses, sat down holding up the huge fish and got out a set of digital scales. The big bass pulled them down to over 12 pounds. Pew put the lunker in the livewell, arranged to have photos taken and released the fish back into the lake.
“With all the mayhem going on, I didn’t think about measuring her or anything; my biggest concern was that she stay healthy,” he said. “I tried not to handle her too much.”
