Proper round daybreak on March 30, Brad Tucker and Ted Taylor launched Tucker’s Phoenix bass boat onto Lake O.H. Ivie. The pair of veteran anglers had pushed from their properties close to Dallas to the 20,000-acre reservoir east of San Angelo due to Ivie’s popularity as one of the best trophy bass lakes in Texas. Now they had been in search of bass weighing 10 kilos or higher utilizing forward-facing sonar.
“I’d by no means caught a ten pounder, and Brad wished to catch an even bigger bass than his private greatest teener,” Taylor tells Outside Life. “We discovered some massive bass on Ivie once we began fishing Monday. However the massive ones wouldn’t hit. I believe we caught about 8 bass. The largest was a 6.5-pounder.”
The subsequent day the 2 fishermen hit the lake once more. However this time they tried a distinct space alongside the northern a part of the reservoir, Taylor says. The water temperature was 64 levels, and pre-spawn bass had been holding deep close to creek edges. They positioned some massive bass however none of them would hit a lure till the night.
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“We noticed [one bass] on sonar a few foot off backside above some rocks,” says Taylor, a 49-year-old protection contractor from Allen. “I made a forged to her with a delicate plastic 5.5-inch watermelon coloured lure [that looked] like a bluegill.”
Taylor watched on sonar as his lure dropped towards the bass. It was taken down with a 3/8-ounce sinker pegged to the hook, which was rigged weedless, Texas style, contained in the bait.
“Brad and I each noticed her tip right down to take my lure, and that’s once we realized how big she was,” Taylor recollects. “I felt line pressure, set the hook, however a smaller male bass had rushed in and brought my lure as a substitute of the large fish.”
Taylor rapidly introduced the 2-pound bass to the boat and launched it. Tucker then tried one other forged to the fish that they nonetheless might see on sonar. The large bass ignored Tucker’s lure. So, Taylor forged to the fish. Then he felt pressure once more.
“It simply felt heavy and I set the hook,” Taylor says. “I didn’t realize it was a fish at first, considering it is likely to be a snag – till I felt the pulsing of her tail. Then I knew it was an enormous of a bass.”
He leaned on the bass with all his energy as a result of the world the place the fish was hooked was a nightmare of flooded timber, rocks, and woody snags.
“I received her up as quick as I might to the boat and Brad scooped her up in our touchdown web. We received her out of the online and had been shocked at her measurement. Brad stated instantly that it was a ‘teener.’ On our Bubba boat scale, she weighed 14 kilos.”
The anglers knew instantly that it was a Legacy Class ShareLunker. They referred to as Natalie Goldstrohm, the Texas ShareLunker program coordinator, who despatched out a state fisheries group to weigh and measure Taylor’s bass. This is able to be the group’s final mission of the season, for the reason that ShareLunker program solely accepts entries throughout spawning season, which runs from Jan. 1 to March 31.
The fishermen ran again to the ramp and loaded the boat onto a trailer with the bass nonetheless within the livewell. They drove to close by Elm Creek Marina, which opened their retailer to put Taylor’s fish in a big, aerated bait tank till the state ShareLunker fisheries crew arrived to formally weigh and measure the bass.
When the ShareLunker group arrived, they weighed Taylor’s bass on licensed scales at 14.22-pounds. The fish had a 24.5-inch size and an unimaginable 22.5-inch girth.
“The girth on this bass was great — virtually as massive because the fish’s size,” Taylor says.
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Often, the ShareLunker group would take the trophy bass again to a state hatchery for spawning. However Goldstrohm says the holding tank was already full. So, biologists took samples and gave the dwell bass again to Taylor, who headed out with Tucker again onto O.H. Ivie.
“We used GPS to run proper again to the spot the place she was caught and launched her there. She was in nice form, and he or she ought to spawn and produce loads of fry that hopefully sooner or later will develop as massive as she is.”
This 12 months’s ShareLunker season was an enormous success by any measure. At least 19 bass weighing 13 kilos or extra had been caught and donated by anglers throughout Texas. The heaviest bass of the 2026 season was a 16.04-pounder caught by Austin Miles at Purtis Creek State Park Lake. That fish ranks among the many high 30 heaviest largemouth bass ever recorded in this system’s 40-year historical past.
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