Outdoors with Larry: The one that got away

By Phil Cobb | March 21, 2025 |

I like fishing big reservoirs in March. Fifty-five years ago, I fished Beaver Lake with an uncle on a cold windy day using a lure called a spider, just a big spinner bait of that time. For three hours I didn’t catch a single bass, but about ten in the morning, only a hundred yards from my truck, I was rewarded by a hard strike. The biggest bass I have ever seen nailed the spider and fought hard for nearly ten minutes. I gazed in awe at the huge fish in the water beside me, and finally got my thumb in his mouth. His fight ended with a few flops on the boat floor.

In Rogers, Arkansas at a sport shop, they weighed the bass at nine pounds and 14 ounces, for which I got a “lunker pin.” I had the fish mounted because I knew it was my last and only chance at a 10-pounder. My uncle said it surely had weighed ten pounds when I caught it, but I should have put a rock in its gullet anyway. Only a few years back, however, I landed a 9-pounder from Truman Lake and I have caught several 8-pound bass from various waters lakes, ponds and rivers. I must admit to losing more bass of that size than have landed.

But it is rivers that I love to fish and last week when the temperature rose into the 70s, I took a trip to a river, going about five miles upstream from an Ozark reservoir. It’s a reservoir where I have never caught a smallmouth bass. But there must be some there, because every March there is a movement of smallmouth up that river. It is something you are not suppose to see in smallmouth, a bona-fide migration of hundreds of smallmouth. By sometime in May they are gone.

I found them last week and one afternoon I had a ball catching forty or fifty 14- to 18-inch brown bass out of one deep eddy. I was all by myself and the calm peaceful river was a reward in itself for the few hours I spent there. I was lucky to have found the bass. They were deep in a ten-foot hole about 40 feet wide. For about three hours they hit any deep-running lure I tied on, six different lures. But what they seemed to like best was a six-inch stick-bait that I could crank down about four or five feet. And with that I had something rare happen. There was a savage strike and after it, instead of a struggle, there was just a hard pull. Moments later I saw why … there was a 13-inch smallmouth on the rear treble hook and a 16-incher on the front hooks. Together there were about three pounds of bass. I netted them and there was chaos on the floor of my boat. It is hard to disengage the hooks on a pair of bass doing most of the fighting after they have been boated.

But the worst was yet to come. I was casting a sinking, wobbling lure once known as a “Cordell Hot-spot” when it was engulfed by a slab-sided frog-eater of a smallmouth. I could see his broad bronze side when he came deep alongside the boat, fighting against my drag with a fury I had yet to see on that day. I got him in close enough to just see a big tail wave good bye. He made a powerful lunge that broke the line. I hated losing that lure; hated losing the smallmouth. I would have released him anyway but had he visited the inside of my boat I would have been able to tell you how long he was. I am sure, in doing the algebraic equation of x equal a 5-inch tail and a 5-inch tail equaling better than 4 pounds in fish weight, that he weighed better than four pounds Being an outdoor writer bound to uphold the “truth in journalism” rule, I wouldn’t stretch things about any fish I lost, though I have exaggerated a couple that I caught. For instance, before the day was over I hooked a real whopper-dock of a brownie and landed him. I would love to tell you he was and 18-incher but he wasn’t. He was short of it by about three-eighths of an inch, doggone it. It could have been a half an inch or maybe less. The fish just wouldn’t lie still to be measured accurately. If I had of scrunched up his tail I expect I could call him an 18-incher … but I am a real stickler for accuracy. I may go back and measure him again this week!

My website, which shows all my books and magazines, is larrydablemont.com and my email address is [email protected]

Larry Dablemont is a naturalist and outdoor writer who writes a weekly outdoor column for 30 newspapers

in three states. He has worked as a

free-lance feature writer for many national magazines and today owns his own publishing company, is the publisher of two magazines, and has written 10 other books.