Ross Gomez can’t really explain the connection he has with a 14-plus-pound largemouth bass in North Texas. But after catching the same trophy fish three times in four years from the same spot on Lake Alan Henry, it seems their fates are intertwined.
Gomez’s latest brush with the bass occurred on Jan. 22, while he was fishing with a buddy on a public dock — the exact same dock where he caught the big bass in 2023, and again in 2025. Both times, Gomez donated the fish to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s ShareLunker program, so it could be spawned in a special facility to produce future lunker bass. And both times, the bass was released back into Lake Alan Henry in different locations more than two miles away from Gomez’s lucky dock.
“We’ve been making jokes and stuff that maybe she came back again,” Gomez tells Outdoor Life. “But, you know, I never thought it would happen a third time. Many people fish there, and I just happened to go fishing that day. And then she came up and hit this lure. And I’m like – I don’t even know why. I just don’t.”
Gomez says he headed down to the dock that afternoon with his friend, James Robbins. The large dock has several boat slips and goes out roughly 75 feet into the reservoir, where the water gets deeper. And just like in 2025, when Gomez last spoke with Outdoor Life about the same fish, he’d gone out with crappie on the brain.
“It was just one of those days when the weather’s coming in … and my whole plan was to catch a bunch of crappie,” Gomez says. “I thought they were gonna be on fire with this arctic front [that was] coming in.”
The crappie bite wasn’t as hot as he’d figured, though. Robbins caught a few keepers, but Gomez wasn’t getting much action, so he switched over to his bass rod. Rigged on the business end was a shiny new Megabass jerkbait he’d recently bought. He could tell right away that it wasn’t your average hardbait — which was reassuring, because it was the first lure he’d ever spent 30 bucks on.
Gomez was casting around the dock, “just admiring the action on that lure,” when lightning struck for the third time. He’d paused his retrieve and the bait was slowly floating toward the surface when he saw the giant fish come up from the depths to slam it.
“And when I say slam it, I mean she hit hard,” Gomez says. “I saw this big mouth open up and boom. Then she went straight down.”
Because of the colder water temps, the fight didn’t last too long. Gomez’s 12-pound fluorocarbon held, the hook stayed put, and Robbins was able to get the fish in the net. Gomez then put her on his handscale, which read 14.78 pounds.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘Well, my other bass weighed 14.78.’ And then I was like, ‘There’s no way.’”
Gomez was now panicking a little bit out of excitement, but he knew the drill. He called TPWD after putting the fish in a water-filled cooler with an aerator. Then he brought it over to a bait shop with a much bigger tank, where it weighed 14.74 pounds on a certified scale. Eventually a team from TPWD arrived with a tanker truck to carry the fish back to the Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens, where all the Legacy Lunkers (largemouth bass weighing 14 pounds or more) are brought to carry on the state’s selective breeding program.
TPWD’s Natalie Goldstrohm, who coordinates the ShareLunker program, was just as surprised to get another call from Gomez.
“He was like, ‘You’re not going to believe it,” Goldstrohm says, adding that Gomez was “completely prepared” to care for the big bass until the agency’s response team arrived. She stresses to other Texas anglers on the hunt for ShareLunkers that they should be ready to keep a big bass alive with some sort of live well, and they should call the ShareLunker hotline as soon as they can.
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Goldstrohm says TPWD was able to verify it was the same fish because it had been fitted with a PIT tag, which is “essentially a small microchip that’s a little bit bigger than a grain of rice.” She also confirms that while other ShareLunkers have been re-caught by other anglers in the past, no angler besides Gomez has ever caught their own ShareLunker multiple times.
Gomez’s fish is now back at the Freshwater Fisheries Center, better known as the “Lunker Bunker,” where they hope it will spawn successfully yet again. Goldstrohm says that in 2023 the fish spawned once and produced 32,285 genetically superior fry. In 2025, it spawned twice and produced 72,133 fry. Most of those should reach the fingerling stage and will then be stocked into other lakes across the state.
After the spawning season, the bass will be returned to Gomez to be released a third time into Lake Alan Henry. Which, in Goldstrohm’s eyes, is a huge success in and of itself. And regardless of where exactly the bass is returned to the water, we all know where she’ll be headed.
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