Tournament fisher and Fresno, California, native Damian Thao was in his kayak fishing Eastman Lake near his home on the warm afternoon of Feb. 28.
He’d been on a tear for big pre-spawn largemouths, including catching-and-releasing an 18.75-pounder just two weeks ago from his solo kayak on Eastman.
“But the warm weather made the bass move shallower getting ready for spawning,” Thao told Wired2fish while on the road traveling to the Bassmaster Kayak Championship tournament on Lake Chickamauga, Tennessee. “I used my forward-facing sonar to locate bass because they’d moved.”
The Catches Continue
He added: “I found some fish with sonar in 15 feet of water on a point. I cast to a huge fish weighing maybe 20 pounds that I saw on my sonar, but a smaller bass rushed past it and struck my swim bait before the big one hit it.”
Thao hooked the bass on an outsize 11-inch trout-imitating swim bait with two treble hooks. He said Eastman’s bass are gorging on trout, which is what his lure mimicked.
Using a 9-foot-long bait-casting rod with a Shimano 400 reel spooled with 30-pound test P-Line fluorocarbon, he said he landed the huge fish in just seconds.
“It jumped once and that was it: Because it was so fat, it couldn’t clear the water for another leap,” Thao said. “I netted it and moved to shore so I could weigh it carefully at the bank and then release it.”
Weighing In and Trying Again
The 25.75-inch bass weighed 14.73 pounds on Thao’s tournament weigh scale, and he caught the fish over a sandy bottom with isolated boulders. The lake temperature was 67 degrees, and with warming weather and water bass are moving shallow in the lake for spawning.
“The upcoming full moon will push largemouths into the shallows to bed,” he explained. “I’ll bet that bass I caught and the 18.75-pounder two weeks ago are bedding right now.”
Thao went back to casting his big 11-inch swim bait after releasing his 14.73 pound bass, thinking maybe he could coax the bigger bass he saw on his sonar into hitting.
“I caught two more fish after the big one — a one-pounder and a six-pounder,” he said. “But it was another incredible kayak fishing day.”
