Lea Anne Powell of Jackson, Texas was fishing on O.H. Ivie Lake with information Dalton Smith again in February when she boated a 12-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass after an intense 10-minute battle. Exhausted, Powell put the fish in Smith’s reside nicely, and so they took it to a close-by gasoline station and RV park the place it was weighed on a licensed scale. After recording its official weight, they re-launched the boat and launched the bass. On the time, neither Smith nor Powell had any concept that it was a contender for a brand new Worldwide Recreation Fish Affiliation (IGFA) world file.
“I used to be on the Bassmaster Basic in Knoxville again in March, and I advised a good friend of mine concerning the fish and confirmed him some footage,” Powell tells Subject & Stream. “He stated, ‘You must get that fish licensed.’” Powell determined to take the recommendation. She submitted a complete listing of required data to the IGFA and despatched them a 20-foot part of the 10-pound check line she was utilizing when she caught the fish. As of this writing, her bass isn’t licensed as the brand new world file for the 12-pound line class within the girls’s class—however it’s pending.
Powell fished for 2 full days on O.H. Ivie earlier than netting the pending file. As a result of the lake is so extremely pressured, the bass aren’t precisely desperate to take a synthetic lure, she says, so her information employed a Livescope real-time scanning sonar system to find a faculty. “Dalton stated, ‘Solid the place I solid,’” Powell recollects. “He casts about 50 toes from the boat right into a bunch of saltcedars, and I solid about 55 toes and barely to the left of that. I used to be watching the reside scope, and I stated, ‘Dude, I feel I bought a follower.”
Powell watched by means of the display because the fish nosed down on her delicate plastic bait after which turned away. When she opened the bail of her spinning reel to let the lure fall again onto the lake mattress, the massive bass nosed down once more and took it. “I felt two little ticks after which gave her the beans,” she says. “It was on.”
Every time she bought the fish near the boat, it did a nosedive and took off once more. She says she was pressured to repeatedly modify her drag all through the struggle. “As soon as we bought her into the web, I went to take the hook out and noticed that she was barely hooked,” says Powell, who caught a 10-plus pounder on a crankbait earlier within the day. “That was in all probability probably the most aggravating struggle I’ve ever had with a fish. I didn’t really freak out after touchdown the 12-pounder. I sort of bought calm. However afterward, after we weighed and launched her, I bought bodily sick from the adrenaline crash of catching two monstrous fish.”
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If licensed as the brand new girls’s 12-pound line class world file, Powell’s catch will greatest a 9-pound, 1-ounce largemouth caught by Sarah Elizabeth Harris in Lake Baccarac, Mexico in March 2021. The all-tackle world file for a largemouth bass is shared by two anglers. George Perry, fishing in Montgomery Lake in Georgia in 1932, caught a bass that weighed 22 kilos, 4 ounces. Manabu Kurita caught one the identical weight in Lake Biwa in Japan in 2009.
