My Largest Fish on Ultralight Tackle

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Out of all of the fish that I have caught in my days of ultralight fishing, there is one that continually sticks out above the rest. I have yet to catch a fish as large, or one that has fought as hard as this particular one did, and have a feeling that it will be a long time before I hook up with such a behemoth again.

The Day Began…

It all started when my nephew decided that he wanted me to take him fishing on a canoe. It had been a while since I’d gone canoe fishing, and with only 1 kayak in my garage, I knew I had to give into him. We made our way south to Salt Springs Run (Florida) where a man who owned one of the small bait shops was kind enough to rent us a canoe he had sitting on the bank. We got down to the water’s edge, loaded the boat, and began casting along the submerged weed lines running parallel to the shore.

Not quite what they wanted…

We spent 3 hours casting a wide variety of lures, only to find out that we weren’t quite using what the fish were looking for that day. We kept seeing boils where largemouth were busting schools of shad, and slowly paddled over to one of the schools. We got close enough to see exactly what it was that they were busting, and proceeded to tie on the closest looking replica that we had in our box. My nephew tied on a 1/8oz Silver / Blue Back Rat-L-Trap, and I tied on the next best thing: Zoom Super Fluke Jr #28 (Rainbow Shad). I made a cast with the weighless jerkbait into the middle of the boils, and waited for it to sink down. Once it sank low enough, I began twitching it back to me until I felt a solid thump, and proceeded to hear my drag scream like I’d never heard it yell before.

The fight…

By the way the drag was screaming, and the amount of line that was being pulled, I knew that I was going to have problems bringing this fish in. The area where we were fishing at was covered in heavy weeds, and I figured that the fish was going to take me down into them. Every time I would reel in 3 feet of line, it seemed like the fish would take another 10 feet, leaving me to believe that it was just going to spool me and I’d be finished for the day. We fought back and forth like this for almost 15 minutes until I talked my nephew into paddling the canoe after the fish while I was reeling in all of the slack at the same time.

My new personal best…

After me and my nephew put our heads together and got on top of where the fish had bedded down, we slowly worked it up to the surface. As soon as it saw us, it took off like a rocket back for the weeds. My nephew grabbed the net and stuck it as deep into the water as he could, while I was fighting trying to get the fish, and the seemingly 30 pounds of weeds back up to the surface.

While we knew the weeds made the fish look very large, we didn’t realize exactly how large the catch was until he got it into the net and we put it onto the Boga Grips. The grips sunk heavily past the 10 pound mark, and swing between 12 and 14 pounds, making this my new personal best largemouth bass, and fish ever caught on ultralight fishing gear. To this day I have yet to catch another behemoth largemouth on even baitcasting or heavy spinning gear which helps this memory stay so vivid in my mind.

3 thoughts on “My Largest Fish on Ultralight Tackle”

  1. I have a similar story. I caught a 29ish inch rainbow trout on ultralight tackle. That’s definitely something I wont forget. My drag was screaming, yelling, and making noises that I never heard it make before. I broke a sweat just thinking about it.

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