Don Stone of Shreveport has been fishing Toledo Bend for decades, back to his youth in Leesville. He’s got a bunch of fishing buddies who visit the big lake as often and religiously as he does.
Now, however, he is the leader of his little group of anglers, all because the fishing gods smiled on him last Wednesday, Feb. 25, and sent an 11.16-pound bass his way.
“All my fishing buddies have had double-digit fish, but I’d never caught one,” said Stone, 62, a retired medical equipment salesman. “Now, I’m not only in the club; I’m the president.”
Stone was fishing with Jimmy Wilmore of Shreveport, looking to get into a protected area where they could fish without facing the whitecaps that 20-mph south winds had kicked up. They went to a spot on the lower end that Stone said another fishing buddy, Grant Westerchil, had shown him.
Getting out of the wind
It was about 9 a.m. when the pair started casting into 7 feet of water, Stone using a Carolina-rigged watermelon red Zoom Fluke on a 7-foot-3 Dobbins rod with a Calcutta 200 reel, with a 5/0 Gamakatsu worm hook on the business end.
“I had fished a tournament with Grant last weekend, and we fished there,” Stone said. “I figured I’d go back, plus, as windy as it was, it was the only place I knew where we’d be out of the wind. We were fishing a south bank.
“I figured we could go in there and catch a few smaller spotted bass. In the tournament, I fished that 7-inch monster Fluke on a 6/0 Gamakatsu, but (Wednesday) I dropped down to the smaller (4-inch) one on a 5/0 hook.
“On my fifth or sixth cast, I was just working that Carolina rig along, and it just stopped. I didn’t know whether I had it on a stump or a rock, then my rod slowly started to bend over. I thought maybe the Spot-Lock had released, but I saw it hadn’t, and my rod was still going down, so I set the hook. It felt like I had hooked a bale of hay, but it was pulling drag. I was afraid it was a big catfish.”
Those fears were allayed when the big fish decided to come to the surface to see what had ahold of her, surfacing about 20 feet from the boat.
“She really pulled drag; she went all the way around the boat, then she came up, and I saw it was a giant bass. I got a real jolt of adrenalin,” Stone said. “I told my buddy, ‘Get the net; it’s a big one.
“She kept pulling drag, but I finally got her to the boat. He missed her with the net the first time, then he got her. When I picked her up out of the net, the hook fell out. It was in that little membrane behind (the rim of her mouth). The hook had worn a hole in it.
“You gotta have a little luck.”
Weighing the fish
Stone had an old set of Rapala scales in the boat; it weighed the fish, which was 25 ½ inches long and 19 ½ inches in girth, at 12 pounds. Wilmore had a set of newer, digital scales, and they weighed the big girl at 11.2 pounds.
Stone put her in the livewell, and he and Wilmore fished five more hours.
“She fit in the livewell perfectly; I thought I was going to have to take out the divider, but I didn’t have to. I had the aerator blowing right on her, and she stayed right there,” he said. “We decided that if she started to look funny, we’d leave. We kept fishing, but I think one of us checked on here about every five minutes.”
Finally, Stone and Wilmore cranked the big outboard and headed to Keith’s Toledo Bend Tackle, where the fish was officially weighed at 11.16 pounds, then tagged and released alive – getting Stone a good foothold in the Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program and a free replica mount of his personal-record big bass.
A beautiful shade of green, Stone said the fish had no marks at all that she might have made a spawning run into the shallows earlier in the month when the water temperature cracked the 60-degree mark.
“The water temperature when we fished the tournament had been 59, but it was 56 when I caught her,” he said. “She didn’t look like she had been on the bed at all. She was just perfect.”
