Vern Evans
Spring is fat bass season in the Great Lakes region, as the big, egg-laden females get ready to spawn. It’s during this time of year that some of the heaviest smallmouth bass are typically landed, and a fish caught this past weekend in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a testament to just how bloated these fish can get.
Steve Schwartz of Grand Rapids shared photos of the chonky 8 pound 1 ounce smallie in a bass-fishing Facebook group on Monday. The fish is an absolute blimp of bass. It looks like it swallowed a watermelon and then chased it down with a case of Bud heavies.
“We got bowling balls in fish!” one Facebook commenter joked (a riff on the notorious walleye-tournament scandal in which a tournament official discovered lead weights in fish.)
In all reality, the female bass was busting at the seams with eggs. She probably had a belly full of crayfish and gobies, too. But the eggs are what really filled her out and, judging from the photos, she was about ready to drop. An average-sized female smallie will produce a few thousand eggs, according to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, while a bigger fish might lay up to 15,000 eggs during the spawn.
Schwartz did not immediately respond to a request for comment, so many of the details behind the catch are unclear, including where the fish was caught. Many social media users have guessed Lake Michigan, and a few threw out Lake Gogebic, which is the largest inland lake on the U.P. Schwartz said in the post that his friend caught the bass on a KVD square bill crankbait.
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“How slow was he reeling that square bill?” another commenter asked. “No way that fish was moving fast.”
To which Schwartz replied: “She definitely came in easier than the 3 lb males. Average crank over a 4 foot rock pile.”
Schwartz added in his post that the smallmouth was released into the lake so she could do her thing on the rocks and produce the next generation of footballs.
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