For those of you who have been following my blog for a while, you'll recall that during each offseason, I'm after a personal best. Well, the time has come. I beat it! However, the record I broke wasn't my personal heaviest bass. The record I beat was the number of bass caught from my boat in a single day.
About two years ago, I held my LifeLine charity event, and we boated 269 bass that day. I never thought I'd beat that number, because that's a ridiculous amount of bass. During this year's charity event for Legacy Outfitters though, we had an unbelievable time on the water as we sacked 365 bass. That's not a typo. We caught one bass for every day of the year. Mind you, that was with three (sometimes four) people fishing. I say sometimes four because Randy White, "The Manster," sat in the boat most of the day and told stories of Tom Landry and the glory days of the Dallas Cowboys. He's a good fisherman and would fish whenever there was a flurry, but for the most part, he'd sit and talk. That was really cool hearing his stories. He probably contributed 30 bass to our count.
A lot of the time when you're catching loads of bass, it's mostly dinks. That wasn't the case here. It was all 2- to 4-pounders, with 3 pounds being the average. They were all chunks, too. The biggest fish we caught was 6 1/2 pounds, and we had six heavier than 6 pounds. There were just a lot of good, quality fish. There were more double hookups than I could count, triple hookups weren't that uncommon, and we even had a number of quadruple hookups.
You can pad your numbers pretty quick when you're counting by four. This lake is about 360 acres, and I think it's been a while since anyone has shown them a lure. The water is clear — you can see abut 4 to 5 feet deep, and our most productive bait was a Yum Money Minnow rigged on a 1/2-ounce Revenge jighead. Our second most productive bait was a Bomber Fat Free Shad BD7, the deep runner.
These fish were on an outside weedline. We parked the boat in 30 feet and cast to 12. There are lots of different kinds of vegetation, and they were on the outside edge of it. By the end of the morning, we were renting Fat Free Shads to the other boat. When they're chewing like that, you can demand a pretty good premium for them! Needless to say, everyone had a really good time on the trip. Obviously, when you catch that many in a morning, it's great. I say morning because our day was supposed to end at 3:30, but as the landowner was leaving, he told us to stay until dark if we wanted. By that time, we had 207 bass in the boat. He tossed us the keys and let us stay to fish even more. There were a few stretches where we went 70 in a row. These were massive schools of bass. If one pulled off, another one got it, and if he pulled it off, another one was there to pick it up.
My hands hurt so badly, they're bleeding in three spots. I guess I should say they hurt so good. Randy White was quick to tell me that if he needed someone to auction off that trip again he'd be happy to do it. This is the third year he's done that for us. He's a very giving person, and I appreciate his help.
The other two men who were fishing with me were Pat Curry, a successful local entrepreneur, and Charlie Rigney. They're not only great fishermen, but great guys. Before this trip, I'd never spent any time with either of these gentlemen, but I really believe that we became fast friends. We'll be spending more time together in the future.
On another note, this afternoon is the first open practice for the Baylor Lady Bears basketball team, so we're going to watch that. Then my girls have volleyball games tonight. They're at different schools, so Jimmye Sue is taking Jamie to hers and I'm taking Kristen to hers.
Tomorrow I'm going to Kilgore, Texas, to visit the Skeeter factory. I have a friend who is interested in buying a boat, and we're going to go up there to take a tour of the place. It's always good to go visit with the folks I've worked with at Skeeter for so many years. A lot of the processes in building a boat are the same now as when I started with the company, but there's always new technology and steps in the process that are added and tweaked. When you get to go and see firsthand the effort and quality that's put into building a Skeeter, it's pretty cool to be a part of it.