Chris Larkin – with a 7.98 pound bass
Few people can say they’ve had a $100,000 meal. A couple of fellas on an Ozarks dock had one last year.
by Nathan Bechtold, republished from LakeExpo.com
The Big Bass Bash, held twice a year on Lake of the Ozarks, draws thousands of anglers all hoping to catch the biggest fish of the weekend. The single largest fish wins the angler who caught it $100,000.
So on the first day of the two-day tournament, when Chris Larkins saw a 7.98-pound bass hanging out near the bank, he knew he was about to win the Big Bass Bash and the $100,000 prize.
“I knew it was a winning fish,” he later said in an interview.
His instincts were right: it would be the biggest fish weighed at the Big Bass Bash in more than a decade of tournaments, and bigger than the next-largest fish caught that weekend, a 7.63-pounder.
Tragically, Larkins’ fish would never touch an official scale, and he would go home empty-handed.
Try, Try Again
While fishing along a shoreline on Saturday, April 20 — day one of the tournament — Larkins saw the monster, lurking just below the surface. The bass was spawning on a gravel bed, shallow enough to be seen without the use of a fish finder.
Larkins resolved to hang at that spot for the rest of the weekend, until he caught the fish. He knew it would be the winner.
With his 21-year-old son using the trolling motor to hold the boat in place, Larkins worked lures past the fish for two hours. Then, finally: a bite.
He reeled in the lunker, his son netted it, but before the celebration could begin, his son observed, “Dad, it’s outside the mouth.”
Tournament rules specify a fish must be hooked inside the mouth for it to be a legal catch: snagging a fish anywhere outside the mouth would disqualify that fish from being a legal catch in the tournament, and it must be released.
Larkins knew he had to let the fish go.
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