Toledo Bend Reservoir handed Ford McGuffee a handful of lemons on Monday, Feb. 24, and he promptly made lemonade.
While the 11.62-pound bass he caught around 9 a.m. was dark green – not yellow – it was still a watery treat.
When McGuffee, a retired 68-year-old angler from Hemphill, Texas, got on the water on the south end of the lake, he headed to an area he wanted to fish, a place with a handful of points where bass pull up to stage on the way back into a spawning area.
“This is a pattern I fish this time of year, every year – yo-yo’ing a Rat-L-Trap on points,” he said. “When I got out there, there were boats set up on all the points where I wanted to start, so I had to go to another one, and it happened to be the right one.”
The flat point, which dropped off gradually into the drain, was the next-to-last one in a series of points headed back toward a spawning area.
McGuffee didn’t have to wait long to find out how good his backup choice was. On his second cast, he was pulling the gold Trap through grass on the bottom in 12 feet of water, letting it fall back to the bottom. On the third fall, a big fish grabbed it.
“She hit it on the fall,” he said. “At first, I thought she might be a 5- or 6-(pounder), but then she started taking line. When she came up and rolled, I figured she was a 10.”
Boating the big bass
McGuffee was fishing by himself, and he was able to tire the fish out, pull her close to the boat, then lip her and bring her aboard.
“I was just hoping she wouldn’t pull the hooks,” he said. “I could see one had her pretty good, but the other was in the top of her lip. In the boat, it just fell out, but the other one had her pretty good; I had to take it out with pliers.
“When I got her in the boat and saw how fat she was, I knew she was an 11 or a 12.”
McGuffee was fishing in a bay boat, not equipped with the normal livewell you’d find in a bass boat, so he knew he needed to get the fish to a certified set of scales in a hurry. He cranked his outboard and motored 10 minutes to Fins & Feathers Resort, where the huge, dark-green bass weighed 11.62 pounds and measured 25 inches long and 21 ¼ inches in girth. After the fish was tagged and McGuffee filled out all the required paperwork to qualify for the Toledo Bend Lunker Bass Program, he released her back into the lake.
“I put her back in the water, but she was pretty stressed,” he said. “It took her a few minutes to get oriented before she swam off.”
The lunker was the second huge fish of McGuffee’s career – he just doesn’t know how much the first one weighed.
“Two years ago, I caught one at night that was bigger,” he said. “We didn’t have any scales in the boat, so we measured her before I put her back. She was 26 inches long and 22 inches in girth, so I figured she was around 12.
“So I’ve got one official personal record and one unofficial personal record.”
