On July 6, two kayak anglers floated and fished along a four-mile run of the Brazos River in Texas. Pro kayak angler Kristine Fischer and her fiance Guillermo Gonzalez had caught a number of good largemouth bass to about five pounds.
Gonzalez was recording videos of Fischer’s catches. In one, which Fischer posted to her Facebook page, she fatefully cast to a large log near shore.
The Fight Begins
“I pitched a green-pumpkin colored urchin bait in a pocket of shade near the log in about two feet of water where there wasn’t much current,” she recalled to Wired2fish. “The fish hit, and it tried to get me around the log.”
The Facebook video shows Fischer working hard to keep the fish from fouling in the log. For a time, it appears that the fish would surely get under the timber and wrap her line around it.
She couldn’t move her kayak away from the obstruction because fighting the bass was a two-hand challenge. There was no way to paddle, and the kayak had no pedal power to ease away from the log.
A Curious Catch
After several minutes, Fischer muscled the fish away from the snag and toward her kayak. Somehow, she gripped the oversize bass by its lower jaw, and then stood in her kayak to display the fish to the camera.
After unhooking the five-pound, 21-inch bass and releasing it where she caught it, she thought more about the fish she’d just caught.
“While holding it and showing it to my finance, I’m convinced it was a meanmouth bass,” Fischer said. “I’d heard about them being in the Brazos River. There are some smallmouth bass in the river living with the largemouths — so natural hybridization is certainly possible to produce a meanmouth bass.”
Identifying a Rare Hybrid
Fischer has caught meanmouth bass hybrids previously, but fish only to two pounds. The five-pound bass she caught that day in the Brazos had all the coloration and fin characteristics of a meanmouth.
“The only sure way to know it was a meanmouth would have been to take a fish scale to a biologist for inspection,” he said. “But looking at the dorsal fins, and where the corner of the jaw was located, I’m sure it was a meanmouth — not a smallmouth or a largemouth.”
While natural hybridized meanmouth bass are rare in the wild, some fisheries departments are breeding and stocking them in certain waters because they are extremely aggressive and fight exceptionally well for anglers looking for a wild battle.
“The colors are very different from most other bass,” Fischer noted. “There was a very visible lateral line on my bass, and the mouth was huge. I could have fit a softball into its enormous mouth!”
