The 31-year-old San Diego resident was fishing alone that Friday afternoon. He’d parked his car and walked to the shores of Lake Jennings, a place he’d fished often since age 8.
“The fishing wasn’t great that day, which was pretty warm in the 70s,” Henson tells Wired2fish. “I was heading back to my car that afternoon and made a cast along the edges of some tules. The water is clear and shallow. I started a retrieve and saw a bass rush out from the weeds to my lure.”
Using a 7-foot baitcasting rod, Shimano reel and 20-pound-test fluorocarbon line, he saw the bass hit his oversize soft lure, a Working Class Zero Battle Shad 7.5 swimbait.
“She hit the lure just 15 feet from the bank, and at the time I thought it was a much smaller fish around 6-pounds because the light reflection on the fish was bad,” explained Henson, an ironworker. “The whole fight lasted only 20 seconds, and when I reached down to grab it from the bank, I was stunned.”
Henson knew he needed to weigh the fish because he thought it might be a lake record bass catch. He had a Bubba portable scale back at his car, so he borrowed a fish stringer from a father-and-son who were nearby. He put the bass on the stringer, put it back in the water and went for his scale.
“The dad watched the bass on the stringer while I was gone,” Henson said. “I got back, weighed it, then let it go. She swam away healthy and strong.”
The fish weighed 17 pounds, 6 ounces on his Bubba scale, but wasn’t measured.
Henson says his fish is now the Lake Jennings record largemouth, topping the previous 17.2-pounder caught by angler Mike Long.
Lake Jennings is one of several water supply lakes for San Diego County. Henson says the lake gets a lot of fishing pressure, and he moves around trying different small lakes in the area.
“It was the first time I fished Jennings this winter, and I’m sure glad I did it that day,” he said.
The lake is regularly stocked with rainbow trout, and some anglers believe Henson’s pot-bellied bigmouth was full of stocked trout from feasting on them. That same day on Jennings, Henson also caught an 8-pound bass, and two days later a 9.9-pounder.
“I release all the bass I catch, so we’ll never know if that 17.6-pounder was full of trout it had eaten,” he said. “I’ll have a replica mount made of that bass and hang it somewhere in my home.”
