Nearly 2½ months after catching a monster largemouth bass, Darren Nunley received confirmation from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency that his fish is a state record.
Nunley, 54, was fishing with professional fishing guide Hensley Powell on Nickajack Lake on Feb. 28 when he landed a largemouth bass weighing 15 pounds, 7½ ounces, breaking the previous record set more than 11 years ago, according to theTWRA.
The old record of 15 pounds, 3 ounces was set by Gabe Keen on Feb. 13, 2015, which had broken a record that stood for more than 60 years.
Nunley was using a Z-Man Jack Hammer Chatterbait lure on 17-pound test when he hooked the behemoth bass.
“It felt like it ran straight toward me at first,” Nunley toldNews Channel 9. “I thought I missed it and then I finally caught up with it.
“It was a pretty good fight, but it wasn’t jumping or anything. I guess it was too big to jump. I didn’t think it was as big as it was in the water, but then when we got it out of the water, I thought, ‘My God, what have I done?’”
Certifying the catch
The bass was weighed on a certified scale at a Save A Lot grocery store in Whitwell, where Nunley lives. Sequatchie County Wildlife Officer Shawn Edgmon witnessed the weigh-in.
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When Keen made his record catch in 2015, he didn’t expect it to last long, saying, “There’s another one in there,” referring to Chickamauga Lake, the location of his catch.
“I think there’s some more 15 or 16-pound fish in that lake.”
The stocking of Florida bass helped
The reason for the big bass in Nickajack and Chickamauga lakes is the fact the TWRA began stocking Florida-strain largemouth bass fingerlings into these waters in 2015 and 2000, respectively. This strain of largemouth bass is known to grow large.
Once Nunley’s bass was in the boat, Hensley obtained an unofficial weight on his scale, and then didn’t waste time heading in to get an official weight, knowing the fish could be a state record, as reported byUSA Today/For The Win Outdoors.
After a lot of waiting, the catch was finally confirmed as a state record.
David Strege is an award-winning journalist who spent most his career as a sportswriter at the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register before evolving into an outdoors writer. He joined Yahoo! Sports as a copy editor prior to providing outdoor-related blogs for a company associated with Yahoo! He is currently doing the same for USA Today.
This article originally appeared on For The Win:Fisherman has largemouth bass catch confirmed as a record in Tennessee
