Jim Franklin of Hemphill, Texas, was fishing alone on March 4 at the south end of Toledo Bend Reservoir. The famed lake on the Texas-Louisiana state line is well known for giant bass, and Franklin has fished it most of his life.
“I’d been catching a lot of bass, some days up to 50 fish, but nothing over 5 pounds,” Franklin tells Outdoor Life of his last few trips to Toledo Bend. “I decided to change it up and fish another area I hadn’t tried this year.”
Franklin made the move that morning to a different a part of the lake. He fished for four hours and caught nothing.
“That’s when I went back to the seven-foot-deep grassy area where I had been catching bass [earlier],” says the 65-year old angler. “It was almost 1 p.m. and I caught a 3 pounder, then a 5 pounder.”
He saw some bass in shallower water and made a blind cast that direction. He was using a Carolina rig with a five-inch soft plastic Zoom Baby Brush Hog in tilapia magic color. Franklin never felt the fish hit. His fishing line just got heavy, and then he saw his line moving off to one side.
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“I set the hook and it took off, jumped 20 feet from my boat, jumped four more times, then took me around my boat and motors. It was a real rodeo,” he explains. “The fish fought really hard for a couple minutes. Then I got it to the surface, and it just rolled on its side and laid there — wore out from the fight I think.”
Franklin netted the bass and knew right away that it was at least a 10 pounder, maybe 11 or 12. He measured the bass at 26.5 inches long with a 21.5-inch girth. Then he put it on his Bubba scale and it read 13.57 pounds.
“I knew right then that it was big enough to be a ShareLunker Legacy bass because it was over 13 pounds,” Franklin says. “What I didn’t know was that when I weighed it, I hadn’t lifted the fish completely off my boat deck, and it was even heavier than I thought.”
Franklin put the bass in his boat’s well-aerated livewell. Then he phoned the Texas Parks and Wildlife ShareLunker hotline and notified them he’d caught a giant, 13-plus-pound largemouth to donate to their famed stocking program. Next, he ran his boat with the heavyweight bass to Fin and Feather Resort on the shore of Toledo Bend.
At the marina, Franklin was able to move the bass over to bigger aerated fish tank. Staff from the ShareLunker program showed up soon after, and they officially weighed Franklin’s bass at 14.23 pounds.
From there the fish was taken to the state’s hatchery in Athens, where it will be spawned, and its fry used to stock lakes around Texas. Later this year, Franklin’s bass will be returned to Toledo Bend where he can release it back into the lake where he caught it.
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Franklin’s bass is the 12th Legacy Class ShareLunker caught so far this year, and the second to come from Toledo Bend Reservoir, according to TPWD. As part of his reward for donating his roe-swollen bigmouth to the stocking program, he’ll be given a replica mount of the huge fish.
“I phoned my wife and sent her a photo of me and my bass, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ — like it was just another fish,” Franklin says laughing. “We have other fish and game mounts in our house, and this 14.23-pounder replica mount is definitely going to hang in our game room, too.”
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