Courtesy Missouri Department of Conservation
A little luck nabbed a record size largemouth bass for 20-year-old
Dylan Gilmore of Perry. Gilmore and his friend, Austin Lake, had set
their trotline on April 27 using goldfish as bait, hoping to catch some
catfish at Ka-Tonka Lake, located in Ka-Tonka Game Preserve and Sporting
Clays Club in Ralls County. When they returned the next day to check
their line, Gilmore realized they had caught something. When pulling the
line to their boat, what he assumed was a catfish instead turned into
something a little more.
“We knew something was on there,” Gilmore said. “I reached down and
grabbed the fish and thought 'oh my gosh, this thing is huge.' It felt
like a dream at first. I have never seen a bass that big in person.”
Gilmore was not quite sure what to do with the large fish, so he put
it in a cooler with aerated water and headed to the Hobby Hut, a bait
and tackle store, on Highway 19 in Perry.
“I shop at the Hobby Hut and figured they would know what to do with
such a large fish,” Gilmore said. While at the store, Gilmore had the
fish weighed. The scale read 9 pounds, 8 ounces. “Once I knew how much
it weighed, I looked up the record online,” Gilmore said. “I found the
web page on the Missouri Department of Conservation’s (MDC) website. At
first, I didn’t think I had broken the record, but that’s when I saw the
line for alternative methods.”
The owner of the store allowed Gilmore to keep his fish in a tank
until he could contact MDC. On May 1, Gilmore phoned Fisheries
Management Biologist Ross Dames and told him about his fish. Dames met
Gilmore at the Hobby Hut to get an official weight on the stores’
certified scale. At that point, Gilmore’s fish weighed in at 9 pounds, 2
ounces and was 23.5 inches long; big enough to nab him a new state
largemouth bass record for alternative methods.
“When I saw I officially had the record, I was pretty excited,”
Gilmore said. “But it also made me think I should have called the
Conservation Department sooner!”
Missouri’s previous state record, which stood for 10 years, was an
8-pound, 2.2-ounce, 24-inch fish caught via trotline, using goldfish
bait in Country Boy Estate Lake in Boone County on Dec. 16, 2002.
Gilmore was not sure what to do with his trophy fish. The owner of
the Ka-Tonka club told Gilmore he could always release the fish and let
it get bigger. Gilmore thought that was a good idea.
“I took a picture of me holding the fish and really, that satisfied
me. So I turned it loose,” Gilmore said. “It made me happy to release it
and it made the owner of Ka-Tonka Lake happy too. I hope someday to
meet it again, and it will be even bigger. Then, maybe I’ll get a new
record.”
It is still sinking in for Gilmore that he is now a record holder in
Missouri. “It’s pretty exciting, something I know I can always have and
be able to tell my son or grandson about,” Gilmore said. “I don’t know
how long I will keep the record, but that doesn’t really matter. No
matter what, I have the certificate that shows I held the record at one
time, something I can always look back on.”
More information about Missouri fishing records is available at mdc.mo.gov/fishing/reports/records
