Joshua Buller, 21, was fishing alone April 27 on a small reservoir in the Willamette Valley of west-central Oregon. He was looking for big spotted bass that were getting ready to hit their spawning beds. Bass were cruising grassy flats near creek mouths in stained water about 7 feet deep.
“I was using my Livescope and spotting big fish,” the Springfield, Oregon, angler told Wired2fish. “I was casting a swimbait, searching for bass.”
Early that morning, he marked a big fish on his radar and cast a swimbait to it, but the bass wouldn’t hit. Then, he cast a drop-shot rig with a blue soft plastic 3 Brothers Eco Shad bait. That did the trick, and the fish hit the soft shad lure.
“The fish was strong and made a bunch of deep-diving runs,” Buller said. “The first run was about 50 yards, and each run was a little shorter, but powerful.”
Using a light 7-foot Daiwa spinning rod with matching Daiwa spinning reel and 10-pound-test braided line, Buller had to play the bass carefully so as not to lose it. Finally, he got the fish close to his bass boat, grabbed it, and brought it aboard.
“It was the biggest spotted bass I’d ever held, and I was freaking out,” he said. “I weighed it on two scales. My hand scale showed 9.2 pounds. My friend Stefan Zeltvay was on the lake that day and he had a hand scale that weighed the bass at 9.3 pounds.”
The bass measured 24 inches long and had a 19.5-inch girth. The fish was ripe with spawn and Buller, who works as an electronics boat rigging technician, put it in his livewell, thinking it may be an Oregon record.
He then learned the IGFA world record spotted bass (Micropterus henshalli) was caught in California in 2017, and weighed 11 pounds, 4 ounces — his bass was a couple pounds shy, but what about the state record?
But when he checked Oregon’s record for spotted bass, the species wasn’t even listed by the state.
“I called around and talked to some state officials and it was incredibly frustrating,” Buller explained. “One official told me they consider spotted bass an invasive species, and a ‘food fish,’ not a state game fish.
“That’s amazing to me, because we have superb big spotted bass fishing in a few lakes. But the state simply ignores this great game fish.
“Oregon recognizes largemouth, smallmouth, and striped bass for records, even bullheads and green sunfish. It makes no sense for them not to have records for spotted bass, too.”
Buller says he’s been fishing spotted bass in Oregon for 15 years — since he was a kid. His parents and grandparents fished for spots, and so do other anglers in the know.
“There are lots of big spotted bass in some Oregon waters,” he contends. “In some tournaments it takes 30-pounds of spots for a five-fish limit to win.”
According to Buller, it’s even illegal for anglers to transport live spotted bass in a boat tank to a bait shop or grocery store for certified weighing. Oregon law prevents transporting live fish from the waters where it’s caught, he says, much the way state regulations treat invasive fish.
“I’m not going to kill a giant bass to have it weighed on a scale some place away from a lake,” he said. “It makes no sense anyway, since Oregon doesn’t recognize spotted bass as a game fish and keeps no records of catches.”
Buller phoned his parents, Corey and Gayle, who came to the lake to take photos of his enormous 9.2-pound spotted bass. They also shot a video of him releasing the fish back into the lake where it was caught, which he doesn’t want to name.
“I know I hold the state record for the biggest spotted bass caught in Oregon,” he says proudly. “I’ll have a taxidermist make a replica mount of my big bass, and that’s plenty good enough for me.”
