The Bass That Was One Board Short of a World Record

Montana angler Daniel Caricaburu-Lundin spent a September day on an Idaho lake watching his Livescope when two genuinely enormous smallmouth holding on the edge of a drop-off that plummets from 10 feet to 100, where they ambush schools of kokanee in the deep water. His first cast with a swimbait brought one up but couldn’t seal the deal, so he switched to a sinking glide bait he built himself — and a bass the size of a small anchor inhaled it. What followed was basically controlled chaos…a fish that launched itself clear out of the water, a drag backed way off to protect his size-4 trebles, a root ball to dodge, and a shallow-water anchor pole doing its best impression of a line guillotine while he listened to it screech. He somehow landed the whopper — 8 pounds, 6 ounces, nearly 23 inches nose to fork — and the bait fell out of its mouth the moment it hit the net, because the fish apparently has a flair for the dramatic. lol.

Then came the kicker: he measured it on a non-IGFA board while his certified board sat in the boat, went home, learned the world length record is just over 20.8 inches, and realized he’d released a would-be world record without the paperwork. (In his defense, the man already holds a world-length-record tiger muskie, so his bar for “notable fish” is admittedly broken.) The lesson: keep an IGFA-certified board within arm’s reach at all times, because trophy bass do not offer retakes. You can read the full story at Field & Stream here.

^{Photo credit: Daniel Caricaburu-Lundin}