It doesn’t matter how many places you fish or how many fish you catch, if you are a bass angler, one thing always gets your blood pumping: a double digit largemouth.
Brett Preuett, pro angler and now part-time fishing guide on Toledo Bend, knows how all that feels. And the latest feeling came when Preuett watched the digital scales at Keith’s Toledo Bend Tackle roll up to 10.84 on a lunker he had just rousted from the lake on the Louisiana-Texas border on Oct. 18. Preuett lives near Monroe when he isn’t fishing.
“I was on my fourth day of guide trips in a row and we had already caught 15-20 bass and we went past a spot I haven’t fished in a couple of years,” he said. “We checked it out on the depth finder and saw a couple of good looking ‘dots’ down there so we shut it down and went to fishing. My client caught one and then he got hung up. My line was right beside his and then it felt like I got hung up.
“I was fishing with 8-pound line and throwing a 3/8-ounce Watermelon Candy colored Creme Scoundrel on a drop shot, so it was pretty sensitive. I felt like it moved and realized I had a fish, so I set the hook and it didn’t move. A second later, it did move and I couldn’t budge it. I thought it was a big old catfish.”
It’s a bass
A couple of seconds later the fish headed to the water’s surface, and when it rolled he knew it was a good bass. He loosened the drag and she ran for a few minutes before he finally got her to the back of his Falcon bass boat. When she came up, he was shocked.
“Her eyes were giant. She was giant. I was definitely excited,” he said. “I didn’t have a net, so I just dropped my rod and put my arms around her, bear hugged her and got her in the boat.”
It didn’t take them but a few minutes to realize the fish was special, so they rode about three miles to Keith’s and handled the official weight and paperwork so she could be released back into the lake. The fish bit around 11 a.m. It came out of about 18 feet of water not far from a bend in the river channel with 40-45 feet of water.
“After we weighed the big one, we enjoyed it a while,” he said. “Then we went back and caught about 10-15 more bass. It was obviously a good day. I guess the best part was that it was totally unexpected to break the 10-pound mark.”
The 10th of the season
The lunker was Preuett’s third largest bass to date. His largest is an 11-4 and he thought he had that one beat, but came up a little short. You can contact Preuett about a guide trip on his Facebook page or his Bent Rods Guide Service Facebook page, or keep up with him on the Major League Fishing tour and other tournaments.
Preuett’s lunker was the tenth double digit bass weighed in through the Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program since June 2023. The goal of the program is to encourage the return of trophy fish to the lake by rewarding anglers a replica bass for catching and releasing their Toledo Bend lunker back to the lake. TBLA hopes it will spawn and produce more potential lunkers and continue to grow and be caught again by another angler. To qualify for a lunker bass replica, the fish must be weighed, registered, and released alive by TBLA or its representative.
And that’s just what Preuett did.
