So, how much is an ounce of fish worth? Maybe over in Japan, prime sushi from a prized bluefin tuna might push $160 a pound – about $10 per ounce.
But on Sunday afternoon, fisherman Ryan Hanson of Bernice found out that an ounce of largemouth bass was worth $103,000.
That was the difference in the first-place and runner up prize money in the Sealy Outdoors Big Bass Splash on Toledo Bend Reservoir, and an ounce was what separated Hanson from John Jones of Newton, Texas, who finished second.
A tight race
The tournament, which drew 2,247 entrants from across the country, wound up with Hanson’s 10.64-pound bass, caught last Saturday, the second day of the tournament, atop the leaderboard. Jones’s big fish weighed 10.58 pounds, with .06 of a pound basically equal to a single ounce.
Hanson won a fully rigged Phoenix bass boat, a Ram pickup truck and $10,000 cash – $5,000 for overall first place and $5,000 for catching the biggest bass between 8 and 9 a.m. on Saturday. Jones won $15,000 for his second-place finish and $5,000 for catching the biggest bass between 8 and 9 a.m. on Sunday.
Layne Lacaze of Robeline finished third with a 10.52-pound bass (a little less than 2 ounces behind Hanson) worth $10,000, plus $5,000 for catching the big bass between noon and 1 p.m. on Saturday. Ryan Wilkerson of Many finished fourth with the event’s fourth double-digit bass, a 10.06-pound bass worth $5,000, plus $5,000 for being the biggest fish caught between noon and 1 p.m. on Friday. Wilkerson’s fish had been tagged as part of the Toledo Bend Lunker Program on March 1; it weighed 11.26 pounds that day when caught by Levi Thibodeaux of Thibodeaux.
On a backlash
The single ounce might not have been the most-interesting facet of Hanson’s win. He actually caught the winning bass on a cast that he’d backlashed. When he finished picking the backlash out and lifted his rod tip, the bass was there, attached to his PayDirt Ditch Donkey, a 7-inch glide bait.
“I don’t know if she ate it before it got to the bottom or not,” Hanson said. “I wasn’t paying attention to my LiveScope while I was pulling out the backlash. I had seen a big fish there on Friday, and we went back to the same spot on Saturday. I had been using the LiveScope, but I wasn’t looking at it.
“Every time you throw that big old bait (the Ditch Donkey is 7 inches long), you’d better have your reel right. You can overdo it easily. You’ve got to get the drag tight.”
Hanson was fishing a roadbed on the main lake in the San Miguel area. He tried to throw well past the edge of the roadbed where the fish was holding, wanting to make sure the big lure’s big splash wouldn’t spook the fish – even though it was 15 feet deep.
Leave the rod, take the fish
Once he was hooked up with the fish, things got even more interesting. His fishing partner that day still had his line in the water, and Hanson’s fish quickly got tangled up in it, and when his partner dropped his rod to get the net, the fish started to take it overboard. Hanson told him not to worry about the rod, that he would probably be able to buy him a new one if he got the fish in the boat. That didn’t take long, and Hanson was soon looking at his $118,000 fish, which wound up being 28 inches long.
“When I first saw the fish, I knew it was a big one,” he said. “That’s when I told the other guy not to worry about his rod. Boy, she was a big, healthy fish.”
It was the second big fishing win for Hanson in 2024. Back in late February, he and partner, Junior Dye, won a Crappie Masters national event on Lake D’Arbonne, his home lake, winning $7,500 for a 2-day total of 21.28 pounds.
A 42-year-old cancer survivor, Hanson said he likes crappie fishing almost as much as bass fishing, although it will take quite a few Crappie Masters titles to measure up to the bump the Big Bass Splash gave his bank account.
“I’ve been (cancer) free for 2 years,” Hanson said. “I’m still a little weak, but God’s been on my side. This is probably the first year I’ve really gotten back into fishing hard.”
