About 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, Steven Thomas of Shreveport, looking to fish some wooden cover, pulled into a midlake area of Toledo Bend that he knew held several stumps. In fact, the first time he slung a Texas-rigged Zoom brush hog in there, he hit a stump that he didn’t know was there – at least he thought it was a stump.
He moved his boat a few feet to cast back at the stump from a different angle.
“That first cast hit something that didn’t feel right,” said Thomas, a 76-year-old retiree who has a camp on the huge reservoir. “I went around to the side and threw in there again, and she hit it like a freight train.”
He kept that “freight train” on the tracks, and minutes later, he was rewarded with an 11.91-pound bass – the biggest by almost 3 pounds of his fishing career.
“She clobbered it like she was mad at it,” said Thomas, open to the possibility that his first cast had actually hit the big bass in 4 to 5 feet of water. “I hadn’t had a very good day before that, but it changed real quick.”
Reeling the big bass in
Thomas was fishing a Lew’s combination – Speed Stik rod and Speed Spool reel – with 14-pound Stren his connection to the big fish, so he knew once he saw her that he had to be extra careful, especially with all the stumps around there – and him fishing by himself, with no landing net. But right away, the fish helped him out.
“She came out of those stumps, then she came up and I saw her for the first time,” he said. “She looked like I could fit my head in her mouth; she had a huge head. I’ve caught some big fish, but nothing like that. She looked like she was as long as my leg.
“I really played her; I didn’t want to lose here. With all those stumps around, I was worried about my line breaking, with only 14-pound test. I knew I had to get her out of there, and she just went all over the place.
“She had me bent over double twice, and I knew I didn’t want her to get any further under the boat, but she swam right out. I got in the seat behind the steering wheel and tried to get her to where I could get my hands on here. I finally got my hand in her mouth, and she made a real hard shake – but I had her good enough to get her in the boat. I looked and she was hooked perfectly, really good.”
A certified weight
Thomas didn’t have a set of portable scales in his boat, but he felt sure he had a double-digit fish on his hands – big enough to qualify for the Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program and get him a free replica mount.
“I called Living the Dream to make sure they were open, and the guy asked me, ‘You think it’s a 10?’ and I said, ‘I think so; she looks like she’s as long as my leg.”
Thomas sped home to his camp, where he picked up his daughter-in-law, then headed to Living the Dream and got a certified weight on the fish – which was 25 inches long and 20 inches in girth – before it was tagged and he got to see it released and swim away, no worse for wear. The fish was the 29th to qualify for the 2025-26 Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program.
“I don’t think she looked like she was full of eggs; she was a big, long, healthy fish,” Thomas said. “She was so healthy; She just hit the water and she swam off.”
