Texas bass guide Austin Miles took out a client on Feb. 16 for a day of fishing at Purtis Creek State Park Lake. They started around 7:30 a.m. after launching Miles’ boat at a public ramp.
“It was about 45 degrees and partly cloudy that morning, but by mid-day the temperature rose into the 70s with a light wind,” Miles tells Outdoor Life. “We were using Alabama rigs with 6-inch soft plastic lures and caught some smaller bass that morning. My client caught a 6-pounder and 7-pounder, and I got one about 5.5-pounds.”
Miles says it was a “decent morning” of fishing that got a whole lot better in the afternoon. By 2 p.m., the water temperature had risen to around 55 degrees. They were focusing on flooded timber in the lake, and Miles was using his forward-facing sonar to find fish.
“I spotted a bass on my sonar near a fallen tree with limbs,” says the 31-year-old guide from Forney. “There were four or five bass in the tree, hanging four feet down in about 10 feet of water.”
One of the fish Miles marked was bigger than the rest, so he told his client to cast to it. The angler made three casts to the suspended fish, and the fish would follow his lure but wouldn’t strike.
“On his third cast the bass pulled off the tree a bit so I made a cast to it with a Megabass 110 jerkbait to see if it would hit a different lure,” says Miles. “I really wanted my client to catch that fish, which I knew was at least a 10-pounder. But when it came for my lure, there was no way to pull it away fast enough.”
The bass slammed Miles’ bait, and the bass fight of his life began.
“The fish came up top and shook its head, and I knew it was over 12 pounds. We were surrounded by trees and stumps, lots of timber, but I got it close to the boat and my angler got the net under the fish and lifted it out of the lake.”
But the bass was rigid and laid across the entire hoop of the net. Its head was on one side of the hoop with its tail on the opposite side.
“It laid there for a second real stiff,” Miles said. “But it finally relaxed and folded over into the net mesh so we could bring it aboard.”
The anglers quickly used a Bubba scale that showed the bigmouth weighing 15.89 pounds. Then they put it in the boat’s aerated livewell and called the Texas ShareLunker hotline to report their catch.
“They sent a team right away to the lake to collect the bass for spawning in their Athens fish hatchery,” Miles said. “My next call was to my wife Mary, and I told her to drop everything, get our three kids, and bring them to the lake to see the bass I had.”
Miles’ family arrived in time to see his outsized largemouth officially weighed at 16.04-pounds. It is the 27th heaviest bass ever caught and recorded in Texas, as well as a pending lake record, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
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For donating his 16.04-pounder to the state’s ShareLunker program, Miles will receive a free replica mount of his bass. He’ll also be notified by the agency when the bass will be returned to the lake so he can enjoy releasing his fish of a lifetime.
“I’m retiring the lure I used to catch that bass, and I’m going to put it with the mount somewhere in my house,” he says. “If that’s okay with my wife.”
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