Five-fish, 56-pound limit highlights late March visit to big-bass heaven
Leyton Lindsey and Nyklas Glass, two Arkansas fishermen, made trips to Louisiana’s Bussey Brake the first week of April 2023 and 2024. Because Glass was expecting a child this April, they decided to move their trip up a week to the final week of March.
After last week, they’ll never go back to April.
Why?
According to Lindsey, for bass fishermen, Bussey Brake “is the place where dreams come true.”
In three days last week, the pair – Lindsey from Judsonia, Ark., and Glass from Searcy, Ark. – landed six double-digit largemouths from the 2,200-acre reservoir near Bastrop in northeast Louisiana. On March 24, Lindsey boated a 12.84-pound lunker; he followed it up the next day with an 11.02-pounder. On March 26, he caught bass weighing 10.25, 10.86, 10.44 and 9.54 pounds. But it was the monster that Glass caught, 15.08 pounds, 26 ¼ inches long, 24 inches in girth, which got a lot of attention.
Glass’s huge bass is the third-largest caught since the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries reopened the lake in 2020 after it took over the lake in 2013 from International Paper. Sid Wilde of Robert caught a 15.78-pound bass on March 8, 2024, eclipsing a 15.36-pound bass caught Feb. 26, 2023 by Robert Rush of Crossett, Ark.
Their five biggest fish weighed 56.17 pounds, and Lindsey said they caught six more bass that weighed 8 pounds or better the same day. Their 10-fish limit, he said, would have weighed between 96 and 98 pounds. All the fish were caught on bushes or willow trees.
Almost all of the bass they boated were spawning, and they were caught on Junebug or plum apple-colored Zoom Ol’ Monster worms, Googan Lunker Logs and Netbait Ions, the latter two being Senko-style “stick worms.” All were released alive, especially the 15.08-pounder that Glass said, “flipped her tail and splashed water on us” when she slid back into her home waters an hour after being caught at 2 p.m. “The best part of the whole trip was watching her swim off,” he said.
A slow start
The trip began on March 19, with Lindsey and Glass arriving at Bussey Break, planning to camp for eight days. The first three days were a washout, thanks to winds that reached 35 to 40 mph. On March 23, things began to turn around a little as the winds calmed in front of a storm – they caught “30 or 40 fish” in a couple of hours that afternoon – and the fishing really turned on Monday, March 24, with light winds and warm temperatures pushing prespawn bass to spawning areas.
Lindsey broke through on Monday with his 12.84, a fish that bit at 6:31 a.m. and looked for all the world like it had already spawned, its belly flat and distended, having already deposited her eggs in a nearby bed. He added an 11.02 the next day, then everything broke loose on Tuesday. Lindsey caught his 10.25 early in the morning, then the pair boated eight more fish in 30 minutes, flipping to bass spawning around bushes and willows that they saw on LiveScope.
“I said, ‘Dang, something has changed,’” Lindsey said. “The weather finally got right. We caught ‘em pretty quick, and we were catching a decent number of other fish, but all we were doing was fishing for the big ones. It didn’t seem to matter which bait we threw that day; when we found a big one, it seemed like it would bite.”
A heart-attack moment
Glass boated his 15.08-pounder around 2 p.m. in about 8 feet of water. After finding her, Glass and Lindsey alternated flipping to the bed twice each; the fish bit all four times but never hooked up. On his second cast, Glass set the hook and came back with nothing – no fish, no worm. The fifth cast, however, the fish inhaled a Netbite Ion, and Glass hung on.
“She was really locked on (the bed),” he said. “She wouldn’t move 5 feet away. I never felt her bite; I just saw the line moving. When I set the hook, it felt like I had hooked bottom. The first time she came by the boat and jumped, she surged, and that was my heart-attack moment. She was definitely strong. But when she surged, Leyton was ready with the net, and when she came up again, he scooped her right in.
“I’ve had about a hundred people ask the same thing – what did a 15-pound bass feel like – but I still don’t know how to explain it.”
A special fish
As many big fish as they had caught, Glass and Lindsey knew this one was special. On two sets of digital scales they had in the boat, the fish weighed 15.42 and 15.32 pounds. Knowing the Louisiana state record was 15.97 pounds (caught by Greg Wiggins from Caney Lake in Feb. 1994), they felt like it was worth the time to take the huge fish to the fishing station to get a certified weight.
“We knew we had a potential state record,” Glass said. “That was the only one we risked taking in to get weighed. Once we knew she was 15, we thought if our scales were a little more than a half-pound off, it might be a state record. But my No. 1 goal was to keep that fish healthy. I was a little worried about how long it was taking, because she was in the livewell for about an hour, but somebody at the ramp gave us some G Juice (livewell treatment) to put in the livewell, and that helped. We took her back to where we caught her and released her.”
The huge fish, Glass figured, had just moved into the bed to spawn. She wasn’t around that willow bush on Monday night, and she was gone by Wednesday morning when they checked in on her. Glass, who said the fish’s tail was a bit bloodied from fanning its bed, believes the fish moved in sometime late Monday and was gone by Wednesday morning.
“It’s been a week, and I still don’t know what to say (about the trip),” Glass said. “And we had one more that we fished for about 3 hours and couldn’t get to bite. I 100% know that was a 13-pounder; by that time, we could tell more about the size of the fish when we saw one.”
