Todd Harris caught the bass on a homemade crankbait
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
That old adage worked out for bass fisherman Todd Harris of Clemmons, N.C., in mid-January, when he caught a great fish on the exact same spot where he’d missed a strike the previous day.
Harris’s reward was a monster, 10-pound, 4-ounce largemouth from one of the most unlikely places, High Rock Lake — which spits out loads of 3- and 4-pound fish, but very few true lunkers like this one.
On Jan. 14, Harris set up to fish a rocky area that had some brush, casting a homemade, flat-sided, square-billed crankbait. He got a violent strike, but somehow, the bass didn’t wind up with a hook in its mouth — swimming toward the boat so fast that Harris couldn’t get his line tight and get the hook set before the fish spit the bait out.
“That one hit it so hard he knocked slack in my line,” Harris said. “Sometimes they are coming to you so fast you can’t catch up to ‘em.”
That night, Harris finished off a handful of new crankbaits, which he said resemble a Baby Pig, a famous, flat-sided bait that runs 5 to 6 feet deep and can be bought online for more than $100. He hadn’t even added the hooks before he headed to High Rock.
Harris arrived at the public boat ramp in Southmont, at the mouth of Abbotts Creek, around 1 p.m., added the hooks to the lures, put his boat in and went just a short distance from the shoreline, making a handful of casts to see if the lures needed further tuning to make them run straight.
This time, the big fish didn’t get away
They didn’t, and he headed to the spot where, the day before, he’d missed the strike from the big fish.
He put his boat in the same position as the day before, lined up the same piece of submerged cover, and in 44-degree water, made “about 15 casts” with the little crankbait, painted in a red, crawfish color. Almost on cue, he got the same, violent strike as the previous day.
“I was super ready for him. I didn’t want what happened the day before to happen again,” he said. “He knocked slack in it again. But I wound up as fast as I could and caught up to him.
“I didn’t think it was a bass. It was too violent a strike. I figured it was a flathead (catfish) or a striper.”
The fish circled Harris’s boat twice. And to avoid breaking the 10-pound test line, Harris punched the button on his reel and thumbed the spool for drag.
“He started coming up, and I saw his tail and knew it was a bass, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh; I need the net.’ It was in the bottom of my boat, and the handle wasn’t even (pulled) out,” he said. “So I held my rod in one hand and played the fish, and I got my net in the other and pushed the button and pulled the handle out. I finally worked the fish up and netted it. It had one hook inside its mouth and one on the side of its head.
Harris released the bass after getting a photo
Harris pulled out a brand new set of Rapala digital scales he’d bought at Rock Outdoors in Lexington that morning on the way to the lake. The fish registered 10 pounds, 4 ounces.
Fishing by himself, he figured the only way he could get a photo of the bass was to find somebody to take it. So he put the fish in the livewell and headed to the ramp. He found one guy fishing from the bank, pulled up and asked the man to take a cell-phone picture of the fish — which he did. Then Harris cranked his outboard, carried the fish back out into open water and released it.
The fish astounded Harris, and not just because it breached the 10-pound mark — a rarity on High Rock, which gets a tremendous amount of fishing pressure from anglers all around North Carolina’s Piedmont.
“The girth was overwhelming,” he said. “I’ve caught big fish where the mouth was so big you could put both of your fists in it. But this one, I could only put one fist in it.
“I don’t think the fish was that old. After fishing for 30 years, I have seen plenty of 7- and 8-pound fish at High Rock that I think were a lot older than this fish. This one looked like a one of those great, big fish that would have come from Jordan Lake 20 years ago — a little, small head with a great big body.”
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