It was midday on February 15 when Damian Thao, 34, of Fresno, California, eased his Hobie kayak within casting range of a deep sunken tree on Eastman Lake. He’d already had a banner morning of big bass action, as he’d earlier caught and released a 7.5-pound and a 10-pound largemouth.
Using a Dobyn’s 9-foot Champion rod and a Shimano 4000-size reel spooled with 30-pound test fluorocarbon line, he sent an albino pearl colored swimbait to the submerged tree on a tapering point.
“I knew the tree was there, and after I let it sink and started to retrieve it hung up a bit in the tree,” Thao told Wired2fish. “I snapped the rod to pop the lure loose, and I got a hit. I think the lure zipping away from the tree triggered the bass into striking.”
Thao says the strike was subtle, not aggressive at all. Just a dead weight on his line when he set the hook.
Big Bass Action
“The fish started to fight, and tried to jump,” said Thao, who makes his living fishing tournaments and creating social media fishing videos. “But I horsed it in fast. I knew it was a nice bass, maybe a 10-pounder. I had a little trouble getting it to fit headfirst into my landing net. But even then, I thought it was maybe a 12-pounder.”
But when he lifted the largemouth out of his net Thao was stunned at its size and tremendous girth. He put it on his kayak’s weight scale, where it registered 17.7 pounds. But because the day was windy and his kayak was bouncing, he didn’t think he was getting an accurate weight.
So he quickly put a fish-gripper on the bass’ lip that was tethered to a kayak leash and paddled to shore where it was calm to weigh the healthy bass a second time. As he headed toward the bank he ran into his pal Mike Moua fishing from his bass boat. Thao showed Moua his giant bass, and Moua weighed the bass on his scale that showed it at 17.46 pounds.
“I knew we needed a certified scale to get a true weight of the bass, which we thought could be a lake record,” Thao explained. “Nothing was open because it was Sunday. So we put the bass into Mike’s well-aerated boat livewell, put the boat on his trailer and drove 20 minutes to Madera, where we could get it weighed on certified scales.”
Thao says on certified scales in front of witnesses, the 27-inch-long bass with 25-inch girth weighed 18.75 pounds.
A Personal Record
It’s the largest bass he’s ever caught bass fishing and could be a lake record largemouth. However, Thao doesn’t want to say where the certified scales location is, as he wants to release that information on social media in the near future.
Additionally, Thao says that he inadvertently violated a quirky California law by removing his bass in Moua’s boat for weighing and then returning the fish later to the lake where he released it. Had he kept the bass, he was in accord with the odd state regulation.
“I never would have violated the law had I known about it,” he said. “But I’m able to sleep at night because I released the bass back into Eastman Lake, where it can spawn this spring.”
