It's not every day that you break a state record. A fisherman may have just broken the Montana state record for smallmouth bass, and he ended up letting the fish go. It will live to see another day.
Fisherman Jeremy Johnson opened up about his attempt to break a record. "I'd always wanted to catch a record-book fish, and I'd been after Montana's smallie record since 2017," Johnson told Outdoor Life. "I guide on the lake part-time [when I'm not at] my oil field job in North Dakota, and I know the lake very well."
The fisherman opened up about the day he hooked his smallmouth bass. "We were in my 23-foot Skeeter, and we were really on the smallmouths that day," Johnson said. "We had a five-fish bag of over 30 pounds, with plenty of 5- and 6-pounders. I'd guess we caught about 30 bass that day."
He said that he ended up battling the fish. "I cast to a rocky point in the main lake that I fish regularly when conditions are right," Johnson said "I caught a small bass, and then about three casts later I got a strike, but the fish dropped the lure. Then the jig just felt heavy, so the bass must have come back to hit the jig [again.]"
Fisherman Battles Bass
"It was a short, intense fight, and when Rob hoisted it into the boat I was in disbelief," Johnson says. "I put a tape measure on it and it was over 22 inches long. I'd never caught a smallmouth that long, and I thought it might be a record. But the bass was long and lean, not short and blocky like most big smallmouths from Fort Peck."
The fish weighed over 8 pounds on a handheld scale. Montana's state record is 7.84 pounds. An official scale weighed it at 8.4 pounds. Ultimately, the fisherman chose to let the fish go and live. He looks to one day catching it again.
"I let that fish go, and it swam away fast," said Johnson. "I know where I released it, and maybe a year from now I can catch it again and maybe break my own record."
