Keith Bryan said he is still in shock after catching 10.48-pound spotted bass during a pro-am tournament on New Melones Lake in central California on Feb. 22. But it wasn’t until March 10 that Bryan found out he will likely be the holder of a new IGFA world record.
Bryan, the owner of Powell Rods, was fishing the first day of a two-day event when he caught the fish that anchored his 21.39-pound first-day sack.
“That’s a huge largemouth. It’s got to weigh 11-pounds,” said Bryan’s amateur partner Charlie Delight when the fish first made it into the boat.
Bryan’s response was, “Dude! It’s a big fish, but it’s not a largemouth!”
Bryan went on to win the tournament with a 17.10-pound second-day sack, which was the most important thing to him, and the spot took big-fish. However, trouble with the scales made it a tense few weeks before Bryan received some confirmation that his fish was likely a world record.
After weigh-ins, Bryan took the live fish and found some certified scales at a local market. By the time the fish was weighed a second time, it weighed just 9.91 pounds. It is known that fish lose weight while they’re sitting in a livewell, and the certified weight fell well below the existing 10.27-pound record.
Bryan then took the fish back to the lake and released it. He figured he had caught the fish of a lifetime and wasn’t too worried about the IGFA record. He went ahead and filled out the IGFA application, anyway, and it was in the fine print that he discovered he could submit the tournament scales that took the original weight for certification. The scales were shipped off to IGFA headquarters in Florida.
On March 10, Bryan received word that the tournament scales checked out as accurate and that IGFA would accept the original weight of the fish. It takes IGFA at least 60 days to investigate submissions, so the record was still pending at press time.
Also pending is Bryan’s 8-pound line-weight record for spotted bass. He was fishing a wacky-rigged, color 330, 5-inch Gary Yamamoto Senko. Bryan had inserted a 3/32-ounce Lunker City Nail Weight in the nose and rigged it on a size-2 wide-gap weedless finesse hook. He threw the rig on a 6103mef Powell Inferno spinning rod and size 3000 Shimano Sahara reel filled with 8-pound-test Power Pro braided line, tipped with a leader of 8-pound-test Seaguar Invizx fluorocarbon.
The pattern he was on was producing good fish.
Bryan said he had a solid milk run of about five spots where he and his partner had already caught some very nice spots in the 6-pound range. The monster fish came off a point in the mouth of a river arm, where a 10-foot-deep shelf fell off into about 30 feet of water.
Bryan said the fish was full of eggs and its tail was showing some red where it looked like it had been fanning out a bed.
If IGFA certifies the catch, it will replace the current 13-year-old record, a 10.27-pound fish, caught by Bryan Shishido in April 2001. That fish was caught from Pine Flat Lake, California, which is about 100 miles southeast of New Melones. Both are in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
An interesting twist, reported by Bassmaster, is that Shishido’s fish also weighed 10.48 pounds on tournament scales. Shishido’s record application was submitted with the second, lighter weight taken on certified scales.
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