Early Morning Fishing Catches a Hog

On Sunday, you may have seen that we got out early to do some fishing. We headed out at 5:45 to grab some minnows and were on our way to some abandoned farm ponds deep in the woods where a new development is being built. It didn't take long for the fish to realize that food was falling from the sky. We had strike after strike on minnows and rooster tails.

Matt tossed in a minnow on a bobber and leaned his pole against a tree. He just bought a new baitcasting reel and had yet to tweak the settings, much less figure out where the drag was. A moment later, his bobber is sucked underwater, his line starts reaching for the middle of the pone, and his pole starts toward the water line. He grabs it and sets the hook, but the drag continues to sing. He's unable to reel due to the lack of drag and uses his thumb as a stop on the spool. It was about this time that I started filming with my phone. The bass breaches the surface and shows it's size. We both are shocked. With Matt being unable to reel, he reverts back to his 4 year old ways and starts backing away from the water. As the fish gets closer to the bank, it heads for some tree branches in the water. I quickly grab the line and guide it back to the open water and the bank. I lip the bass and am struck by the shear size of this old pond bass. Matt and I don't ever strictly bass fish, so this thing is a monster to us. We set it on  a stringer for about 3 hours as we continued to fish, then it took us 45 minutes to find a fish scale. By this time, the big bass had lost considerable weight and started to dry up. The "dry" weight was over 5 pounds with a length of 21 inches. I can only imagine how much weight was lost prior to our weighing it.