The Fifth Annual Liberty County Bulldog Booster Bass Match received underway June 28 on Florida’s Apalachicola River. Match anglers Joe Durden and Wynn Fletcher launched Durden’s boat that morning, taking off from Bristol Touchdown together with the opposite rivals.
Fishing was powerful till round mid-morning, when Durden noticed a small faculty of good-sized fish on his Garmin Livescope forward-facing sonar.
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“There have been 4 or 5 good fish holding in a backwater slough out of the primary present of river stream,” Durden tells Outside Life. “The mouth of the slough was about 12 toes deep. Contained in the slough the underside rose to 4 toes after which it dropped again off to eight toes and that’s the place the fish I marked on sonar had been holding.”
The anglers made a number of casts towards the sonar marks of similar-size fish. On his third or fourth solid with a chartreuse-and-black Strike King KVD sq. invoice crankbait, a fish hit Durden’s plug.
“The fish fought deep and difficult, and I assumed positive it was a catfish,” says Durden, 30, who works as a street inspector in Blountstown, Florida. “I received the fish up close to the boat, and when it got here up, I noticed it was a bass, and it darted across the boat a superb bit earlier than Wynn may web it and put it in my Skeeter.”
The plug Durden was fishing had two treble hooks. One of many trebles hooked the bass on its outdoors cheek, so it fought doggedly towards Durden’s bait-casting outfit.
“I knew instantly it was probably a state document,” says Durden. “It was the largest noticed bass I ever noticed, and in my boat, it weighed 3 kilos 14 ounces. I known as a buddy and discovered the state document was smaller, so I knew I needed to get it weighed on licensed scales and checked by a state biologist to confirm it was a noticed bass.”
The Apalachicola River additionally has largemouth bass and shoal black bass, and it takes a well-trained eye to distinguish one from the opposite. However as an skilled bass event angler, Durden is aware of an enormous spot when he sees one, and so they saved the bass in his stay effectively for the remainder of the competitors.
The anglers didn’t place within the tourney, however after the weigh in, they organized to satisfy with Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Fee officer Will Raker at a close-by farm in Bristol. A licensed scale there confirmed Durden’s bass weighed 3.93 kilos. It measured 18.25 inches lengthy. To confirm that the fish was certainly a noticed bass and never one other black bass species, FWC fisheries biologist Andy Strickland inspected the fish and took a fin clip.
Durden’s bass has since been formally licensed as the brand new state document for the species. His fish breaks the earlier Florida noticed bass document of three.75 kilos, caught by Dow Gilmore on June 24, 1985. Gilmore’s fish additionally got here from the Apalachicola.
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“Catching a state document fish is an amazing accomplishment for any angler,” stated Strickland. “Significantly a document that’s held the take a look at of time for 40 years.”
Durden wished to launch his document bass. However due to the new climate and the time it took to confirm and weigh the fish, the bass didn’t survive.
“I’ll have a taxidermist [mount] that bass,” Durden says. “We didn’t do effectively within the event that day. However catching a state-record fish is best than a win anyway.”
